Earlier today popular blog hosting site, WordPress.com, was undergoing a distributed denial of service attack. A denial of service attack, or DDoS, is where major amounts of data are sent to a server with the intent to overwhelm it and shut down the site. During the attack when the server(s) went down several of the VIP sites like: TechCrunch, the National Post, and Financial Post were shut down. Not only that but the millions of other blogs that are hosted with them were unavailable. Matt Mullenweg had told TechCrunch that this was the largest attack WordPress.com has ever seen, and was 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.”

It is unknown as of now the source of the attack, but there are some obvious ideas. (Anonymous/4chan).

Now of course everything is back to normal and everyone can once again blog away to their hearts content. But boy did it make the headlines, it made the headlines of several big blog companies. It did not matter if they were on WordPress.com or not.

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-Until next post, peace out.