Self-Inflicted Denial of Service (Self-DDoS) in Distributed Systems, Mechanisms and Mitigating Architectural Strategies: When a System "Attacks" Itself, An Analysis of Retry Storms, Thundering Herds, and Cascading Failure

Abstract

"Self-DDoS" (self-inflicted denial of service) describes the phenomenon in which a distributed system, absent any external attacker, achieves the same outcome as a targeted DDoS attack, full or partial unavailability of service purely as a consequence of its own architectural flaws. This paper examines five core mechanisms: the retry storm, the thundering herd, cascading failure, the autoscaling feedback loop, and the cache stampede. For each mechanism a schematic diagram is provided, together with the corresponding mitigation pattern  exponential backoff with jitter, the circuit breaker, bulkhead isolation, rate limiting, and load shedding. The mechanisms are further illustrated through a controlled fault-injection experiment on a Kubernetes test cluster, comparing fixed-interval and jittered-backoff retry policies under simulated downstream latency.