mastodon.xyz suspension on July 5, 2023

On July 5, 2023 from 19:32 CEST, mastodon.xyz became progressively unavailable to all users. The service was restored the following day at 20:26 after a downtime of just over 24 hours. As this was a highly unusual event, I’m writing this article to explain what happened. This is a translation of the original article, in French. Context mastodon.xyz was created on the 1st of April 2017. Most of the registered users, around 24,000, arrived before 2019, then registrations were closed until November 2022, as it had become far too time-consuming to manage the massive creation of bots and spam accounts on the instance.