This morning 7:00 UTC a severe attack was mounted that brought the entire network nearly completely down within 10 min. The attack itself seems simple, the network is overwhelmed by building excessive amounts of tunnels, bringing most nodes to their configured limits, so they deny further tunnels for real users.

The tunnel creation success rate is down to 3%, so the attacker attempts to build around 30 times more tunnels than the network can carry. And one can bet she uses successful tunnel builds to further target the hops involved.

Postman as the single point of failure for I2P torrenting is hit especially hard and is completely offline. If your router succeeds in building some tunnels, you will be able to run existing torrents very slowly using DHT.

I must say that Tixati is working perfectly, and is swiftly restoring the configured number of tunnels to keep connections alive. Built-in HTTP proxy is not that resilient, unfortunately. Apart from the first hours of attack, when the whole I2P network basically halted, I only saw I2P channels disconnects once in many hours, which is no different from regular operation. I2P DHT keeps working, too.

Temporary solution to network overload in beta builds seems to be dropping transit tunnels if they transfer no data at all in first 2 minutes. Tixati should be safe, because even when unused its destinations generate some amount of DHT traffic across all tunnels.

This is I2P problem and has nothing to with Tixati torrent client