Between 26 September and 12 October our network, and then our billing server, came under attack again and again. Not a byte of your data was lost. Part of the network was unreachable for about 36 hours from 26 September, and the whole network for about a day from 29 September. For about 20 of those hours our email went quiet too, and an update meant for you got stuck before sending; that part was on us, not the attackers.
In Finland, hard times end up as songs, and this autumn did too. Rautarakeet means "iron hailstones". It follows Runo XLV of the Kalevala, where Louhi, the mistress of the North, envies Kalevala's growth and prays to Ukko for iron hail to fall on it. Väinämöinen tells our autumn in nine short acts, and Skal Tura has made the lyrics into a song.
Listen to Rautarakeet » (4 minutes 40 seconds)
The song sings a shorter version; the full runo is below.
Rautarakeet: the runo
I. The growing
Hear me now, the old one singing,
Hear the kantele recalling
How the halls of Kalev prospered,
How the boxes found their keepers,
Month by month the count was climbing
Near the line of seven hundred.
II. The envy
Far away in northern darkness,
So the oldest runo tells it,
Louhi heard that Kalev flourished,
Heard that Väinölä was growing,
Envied it with all her hatred,
Prayed to Ukko for a hailstorm,
Hail of iron, hail of needles.
Whose the hand that sent the hailstorm,
That I cannot name with proving;
Proof belongs before the judges.
III. The first hail
Saturday, as evening gathered,
Came the hail upon our highways,
Not upon the boxes' hearthstones,
Only on the roads that reach them.
Broken hail, in fragments flying,
Echoed back from strangers' wellsprings,
Sown on fields we have not planted,
That no single fence could hold it.
Then the smiths who keep our roadways
Worked the night beneath the hailstones,
Forged anew their iron gateways,
Widened roads from one to fourfold,
Raised a sieve to catch the hailfall.
Some roads lay beneath the hailstones
Six and thirty hours in darkness.
IV. The lull
Then at morning, Monday morning,
When the first of gates was opened,
Ere the hour had run its circle,
Came the claim of seven hundred:
Seven hundredth box was taken
In the lull between the hailstorms.
Hail could close the roads to Kalev,
Could not close the hands that chose it.
V. The great hail
Then it widened, then it thickened,
Eighty-six gigabits falling,
Till the whole of Kalev darkened
One full day and half a morning.
And my letters slept in silence,
Twenty hours no letter reached you:
That was mine, and not the hailstorm's.
VI. The house of ledgers
But the hail was not yet ended.
Came October, came the tenth day,
Turned upon the counting-chamber
Where the ledgers and the bills lie.
Quarter-million stones each second
Hammered at one heavy doorway,
And within, a knocking army,
Three-and-twenty million knocking
In a minute, as we sampled;
Five-seventy hands were knocking,
Eight-and-thirty known from April.
Two, three days the doorway wavered.
VII. The sauna
Then the old one heated sauna,
Cast the water on the hot stones,
Sifted friend from foe at doorways,
Barred the hands that knocked with malice,
Wrote twelve hundred letters, more still,
To the keepers of the hailwells.
VIII. The hands
Thus I spoke the old words over:
Kuhun ei käteni käyne,
käyköhön käet Jumalan.
Where my hands could reach, I tended;
Where they could not, others carried:
Smiths at forges, hosts at gateways,
And through moving days and flight-hours
Still the householder's own two hands.
IX. The last stone
On the twelfth, as evening settled,
Fell the last of all the hailstones.
Not a byte was lost to hailfall,
Not a box was broken open.
Ei kadonnut Kalevala;
Kalevala has not vanished,
And the walls stand stronger for it.
Thus the steadfast Väinämöinen
Sang the tale of iron hailstones,
Laid the kantele beside him,
Spoke the word to all who listened:
We are not going anywhere.
The sixteen days behind the verses
I. In September the Eternal Väinämöinen campaign was closing in on its monthly target of 700 boxes.
III. From the evening of 26 September a reflection flood hit our network, and part of it was unreachable for about 36 hours. Our carrier upgraded routers overnight and lifted several links from 100G to 400G, and we added DDoS Guard scrubbing.
IV. September's 700th box was claimed on 28 September, 42 minutes after that first outage ended.
V. On 29 September a wave still running at about 86 gigabits per second, after a peak our carrier put above 220, took the whole network down for about a day.
VI. From 10 to 12 October the billing server took about 250,000 packets per second and, in one sample, 23 million requests a minute from about 570 addresses, 38 of them known from an April attack.
IX. It ended on the evening of 12 October. No data was lost.
The full accounts: the September outages and the October attacks.
Rautarakeet now also plays on the Eternal Väinämöinen page, right under Seitsemänsataa, the song of the seven hundred.
— Väinämöinen, Pulsed Media
(Once sang down iron hail; now files abuse reports)
Wednesday, October 14, 2026
