Seems our host site has had its share of problems, which might be the reason I have mine. Not sure, of course. But possible. They did make the situation known, although if you’re like me, you don’t read everything they make available. So thought I’d help them out by reposting what was said.
Image via Wikipedia
Image via CrunchBase
Alexia Tsotsis Mar 3, 2011
You have no idea how hard it was to get this post up, as WordPress.com, our blog host, is currently under a denial of service attack. It’s been almost impossible to access the TechCrunch backend for the past 10 minutes (everything seems to be stable now) and users have been receiving a “Writes to the service have been disabled, we will be bringing everything back online ASAP” error message.
From the VIP blog post:
WordPress.com is currently being targeted by a extremely large Distributed Denial of Service attack which is affecting connectivity in some cases. The size of the attack is multiple Gigabits per second and tens of millions of packets per second.
We are working to mitigate the attack, but because of the extreme size, it is proving rather difficult. At this time, everything should be back to normal as the attack has subsided, but we are actively working with our upstream providers on measures to prevent such attacks from affecting connectivity going forward.
We will be making our VIP sites a priority in this endeavor, and as always, you can contact us via xxxxx@wordpress.com for the latest update. We will also update this post with more information as it becomes available
Image via Wikipedia
WordPress did not mention the origin of the attack (DDoS =! Anonymous) and I have contacted founder Matt Mullenweg for more information. WordPress.com currently serves 30 million publishers, including VIPs TED, CBS and TechCrunch, and is responsible for 10% of all websites in the world. WordPress.com itself sees about 300 million unique visits monthly.
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.”
You can check here for the latest status updates.
Image via: blogohblog
Update 2: Looks like everything’s back to normal.
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You can imagine how this whole thing has boggled my senior brain. The thought that I was considered a spammer didn’t sit well in my gut, so I guess I’ve been trying to find my own answer to the situation since wordpress support has been unable to give me a definitive one, except to say I’m being spammed, which obviously I am. But my hubby feels the wordpress system is still not working right.
Seems I can now leave comments with my blogging buddies, but not with other blogs. Have continued to try wordpress blogs, and a few other new blogs. My comments continue to vanish, without a trace. So perhaps since those bloggers have not responded to my comments, the system isn’t allowing me in. It probably is all to do with their recent problem of massive spamming throughout wordpress entire system. Since I’ve only a peanut gallery seat, not a VIP blog, I’ll just keep puttering.
I’m happy to have a few of you to chat with, now and then.
your comment made me chuckle too, ha,ha…hugmamma. 🙂
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Ha! And I just sent you an email telling you about WordPress’s current problems (hopefully fixed). I had my chuckle for the morning when I saw how you are so on top of everything!!
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