What is Null route?

Why Null route matters

From the customer's point of view a null route is indistinguishable from a successful attack: the service is unreachable, which is precisely what the attacker wanted. It exists because the alternative can be worse — an attack large enough to saturate a shared uplink degrades every other customer behind it, so the address under attack is dropped upstream to protect the rest. A provider that reaches for null-routing quickly is telling you its scrubbing capacity is thin. OnionVPS filters first and null-routes only when an attack exceeds what the edge can absorb without collateral damage, and tells the affected customer when it happens rather than leaving them to diagnose an outage that has no cause on their server.

Null route in practice

When an attack saturates the edge, the address gets dropped upstream. You see the server go dark: no ping, no connections, and the panel shows the route as nulled. Costs you time diagnosing a problem that isn't on the box, and you lose the fight—the attacker wins. OnionVPS filters first and null-routes only when traffic exceeds what the edge can absorb without hurting neighbours. Check the panel first; if it says null route, wait it out and keep logs clean.

What people get wrong about Null route

People assume a null route means the attack failed. Wrong: it means your service is down, which is what the attacker wanted. The null route is a protective measure for the network, not a defense for your box. You're not getting scrubbed—you're isolated. The correction is to see it as a sign the mitigation capacity was exceeded, and plan for attacks large enough to trigger it.