Apologies for the difficulty many folks had accessing this site on Thursday – you weren’t alone. WordPress, the blogging service that is the platform for this blog and thousands of others, was undergoing a severe DOS (Denial of Service) attack, where hackers direct a fleet of zombie computers to make simultaneous requests to a target server with the intention of bogging down service.
Update: Automattic and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg tells us that this is the largest attack WordPress.com has ever seen, and is likely to be politically motivated:
“There’s an ongoing DDoS attack that was large enough to impact all three of our datacenters in Chicago, San Antonio, and Dallas — it’s currently been neutralized but it’s possible it could flare up again later, which we’re taking proactive steps to implement.
This is the largest and most sustained attack we’ve seen in our 6 year history. We suspect it may have been politically motivated against one of our non-English blogs but we’re still investigating and have no definitive evidence yet.”
Everyone wants to know which blog was the target of the largest denial of service attack in its six-year history the popular blogging platform WordPress.com. The attack affected a number of A-list sites like CNN, BBC and TED.
WordPress.com, a popular blogging platform, was hit by a large DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service Attack that affected connectivity to a number of its blogs.
The attack appeared to have begun just before 11 AM Eastern Time on Mar. 3 and lasted for about two hours, according to a status page on parent company Automattic’s site. WordPress.com is a hosted blog platform with a number of large customers, including TED, CNN, BBC, Red Hat and Flickr.