On a good day, the Linear team helps companies build better software by streamlining issue tracking and project management. When they’re not doing that, they’re trying to get back to doing that as quickly as possible. At least that was the case on October 13, 2022, when the Linear site experienced a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that took down their homepage. Thanks to some quick footwork (and bold inspiration) from the team, they turned a problem into an opportunity, creating a homepage out of Figma files, and unintentionally throwing what will surely go down in history as one of the best Figma parties of all time. We talked to the team about how it happened, and what they learned.

Paco Coursey (Design Engineer): A few days before launch, I tweeted that we’d really pushed our file to the limits. We had been exploring designs for a couple of months, and there were so many frames, so many big images. It had all our inspiration, all our iterations. It was huge. So I shared that image, tagging Edgar (a designer on the team), mostly to get him more Twitter followers. But also to give a peek at what goes behind the scenes as we were scaffolding all these new directions.

Jori Lallo (Co-founder): Usually, our redesigns happen over a few late nights, but this time the crew had been working on the design for longer. Everything still came together in the last 24 hours, as always. It was worth it though; it was received well and made a nice splash online.

The next day, though, we started to get reports that the site was down. So, a bunch of us jumped on an incident call. At first, we thought it was something with the redesign, perhaps a completely benign change that had caused the site to go down. As we investigated further, we realized it was a DDoS attack, which are pretty common these days.

Our first priority was getting people back into the app, which we were able to do by sending people directly to the login page when they visited any of our sub-pages. There was still all this talk on social about our new landing page, but when people clicked through to our site, they weren’t seeing it. They just landed directly on our login page, which was a bit anticlimactic.

Paco: Jori messaged us and was like, “What if we put up the design file from Figma?” I was like, “Okay, yeah we can do that.”

Jori: Edgar and Paco were a bit hesitant. But I said, “Just trust me.”

“No, we don’t name our layers.”

Paco: A lot had changed in the final 24 hours before we shipped the site, and the Figma file wasn’t up to date. So, Edgar and I started updating the file to reflect the final final design, then moved it into a public Figma file. While we were working on it, I shared the link with Jori, who pushed the redirect live sooner than we expected and people started streaming into the page. So as people are showing up, I’m jumping in, copying over frames from our original Figma designs and using text fields to add titles that explain our decisions and give a bit of context.

Edgar Ambartsoumian (Designer): One of the first comments I added was about how, no, we don’t name our layers because I knew people would notice that. They’d be like, “Oh, Linear doesn’t name their layers.” But the whole point was to show how we work.

Paco: It’s true, we don’t name our layers. Some things matter, some things don’t. We aim for the output, not for process.

Edgar: I’ve never seen a company show the design itself and let people see the styles and sizes they’re using. My biggest fear was that people would be able to access our component library or design system files. But that was a quick fix. We changed the access, and that was it. 

And I passed a thousand followers. Pretty nice for a guy that doesn’t tweet.

Making lemonade out of a DDoS attack

Paco: Originally, sharing the Figma file was about making up for the DDoS and getting our users back into our redesigned homepage, but then the Figma file became its own experience. People tweeted about the “Linear Figma Party” and posted screenshots with hundreds of cursors. At one point, there were 300 people simultaneously checking out the file.

Edgar: Since the file was view-only, people couldn’t edit it, so they started using cursor chat to ask questions and chat with me. I began writing down their questions along with my answers. We realized that there was an opportunity to do a live Q&A in the file, to really give people the peek behind the scenes we initially intended. In hindsight, that was a good decision, because even as we speak, there are four people in the file who can still read through the archive. Everything’s preserved.

The Q&A also gave us a good opportunity to add some context. People asked how we arrived at one version over anothe