Somewhat personally funny story.<p>Some number of years ago I saw a huge traffic spike on <a href="https://jsonip.com" rel="nofollow">https://jsonip.com</a>. After investigating, I saw that someone who seemed to have a misconfigured squid proxy that wasn’t valid IP data was hitting the api hundreds of times a minute.<p>The scale of jsonip was a lot smaller back then and still just a personal project but the requests were significantly crushing the server in addition to regular traffic.<p>As a mild joke, I updated the code to return “418 You are a teapot” for the squid proxy briefly. Just long enough for the user to be “wth” and investigate so they’d update their configuration. I just targeted the obviously malformed requests.<p>Within a day or so the proxy either stopped making requests or got fixed.<p>I got a laugh out of it and removed that code. Hopefully the person on the other end also got the joke.