Ask HN: How can sharing stories on Instagram DDoS my phone?

1 points by farmdve 1 year ago | 1 comment

So this has puzzled me how a single app can DDoS a connection of the entire phone sharing an Instagram video to your story.

Why would the Android connection manager or whatever stack is used permit an application to load the connection in such a way.

How to replicate:

1. Share short on instagram to story. 2. Watch as YouTube, Facebook and Instagram stop loading any videos or content. Browsers do not load pages.

PaulHoule 1 year ago |

I have long had ADSL connections where the upload is slower than the download and long ago I would get into cyber battles with people who had them and did a lot of research into he performance characteristics of asymmetrical links, I suspect that cellular data is asymmetric too because the base station is a big high power system and the phone is small and low power.

Even when you are downloading in the fast direction, TCP sends ACK packets in the other direction, if the traffic in the slow direction overwhelms the slow path it will cause latency and/or packet loss for those ACK packets and cause the fast direction to become unusable.