Last night, a flak link escaped into the twitterverse where it was discovered by a “Google-HTTP-Java-Client/1.17.0-rc (gzip)” (whatever that is), which then proceeded to send flak a serious of cruel and unusual requests. Like the unique snowflake it is, flak’s HTTP parsing is rather delicate. In this case, sending a cookie without a value invoked the dreaded “table index is nil” error and crashed the process. Now, flak cannot be laid low by any one rogue request because it is powered by a whole host of processes, but after the relentless onslaught of four such requests, everything was dead.

Bug fixed. Another related bug found and fixed. And we’re back online. Until the next bug.