WHAT DO YOU MEAN THERE ARE NO ANGRY PEOPLE YOU FUCKWIT!
(I'm just joking. Are we doing /s here?)
Cloudflare can protect against DDOS. In this instance the people are ddosing the server, although not intentionally. There are just a lot of people trying to open the site. So it's not malicious but still an "attack", which cloudflare's service mitigates. In reddit it was called the "reddit hug of death", when small sites kneeled down because a post got popular with their links in it.
And yes, there are, the second largest is fedia.io You can find more here:
To quote ljdawson, the dev of Sync for reddit: "Apart from crashes I don't track shit."
He was asked how many API calls Sync's users have on average. He simply couldn't answer. That's why we loved 3rd party apps.
@darius
@lemmy.world