Not trying to discourage people from doing this, but they likely have caches or rely on CDN's that wouldn't really show any impact of any kind. Even if they do, a single day of being "down" is not doing much. For it to be effective people would need to continue this for weeks, and I don't see anyone caring enough to do that— they're not even willing to ditch facebook/twitter/whatsapp, we think they're going to maintain a DDoS attack?

Same issue with uploading encrypted backups to Amazon Drive/Google Drive/OneDrive, etc; there's already built-in limits that protect them, and at the end of the day you're just using what you already paid for. If you fill up your storage you have to pay them more to use it. Not a good strategy IMHO. The only real way to hit their wallet is to leave their ecosystem.

[–] rbn@sopuli.xyz 1 points 3 days ago

Aren't they paying for storage and traffic independent of the availability of the service? So if 100,000 people uploaded 15 GB of encrypted backups to a free Gdrive, they pay for ~1.5 Petabyte of storage and traffic. I mean it's probably not significant for Google but it should cause at least a little costs without bringing any value (as long as you upload encrypted or bullshit data).

The main downside I see would be the negative impact on the environment. My example above would lead to plenty of additional hard drives and electricity that's just wasted for nothing.