Infra stress test amid Kyun outage

We use privacy-focused hosting service Kyun to host a portion of our infrastructure, which went down on September 16, 2026, due a serious incident on Kyun's side. After a few days of waiting, we decided to redeploy everything to another server.

Due to this incident and the fact that Kyun didn't warn customers about the upcoming migration to a new data center, Kyun was downgraded in our hosting category. That said, Kyun is still a very solid budget option for privacy-preserving hosting, but if you can afford paying more, then Njalla is more reliable with better uptime.

Most of our infra runs on Spasm, which has easy deployment methods with Docker/Podman and Ansible, as well as scripts for restoring backups, but Session SOGS is pretty outdated, so it only supports old distros like Debian 12 and Ubuntu 22, and restoring a backup is not a trivial task. Anyway, this incident was a great stress test for our infrastructure that allowed us to evaluate our censorship resistance, since our directory, podcast, videos, blog, forum, and Session channel went down.

While we were able to redeploy everything to another server, let's imagine that redeploying was not an option because our domain name was seized. This is a real risk as domains represent outdated tech without self-custody and our domain .vegas is managed by a company based in the US, which is a very hostile jurisdiction that wages war on freedoms all across the world.

So, let's see which parts of our infrastructure survived during an outage and how vulnerable they are to censorship.

• Our private Session group lives in a Session swarm, making it hard to censor.
• Our SimpleX group is p2p, which greatly increases censorship-resistance at the expense of UX.
• Our public SimpleX channel is hosted on default SimpleX servers, which is vulnerable to censorship, but doesn't rely on our DNS.
• While our Spasm forum was down, we could still use other friendly Spasm instances with our identities.
• We could still use the Nostr network with our identities.
• Our Session <-> SimpleX bridge git repo was still available on Vastrum and on Spasm's Forgejo instance.
• Our static website was still available on IPFS via ENS.

In other words, we already achieved pretty good resilience outside of slave tech's walled gardens and we will continue improving on that front to make sure that we can debunk privacy myths, crash slave tech, and deliver uncensored cypherpunk news without statist propaganda. That said, a powerful adversary will still be able to knock out a large chunk of our infrastructure, but he will not be able to fully censor us.

UPDATE: servers went back online without any data loss about three weeks after the incident.