News sharing site Reddit was brought to its knees earlier today by what it says was a “malicious” denial-of-service attack. The site is functioning now, but with limited availability, it says, thanks to the attack.
Site availability continues to be impacted by a malicious DDoS attack.
— reddit status (@redditstatus) April 19, 2013
Reddit has not offered any clues as to who is attacking it or why it thinks the attack is malicous, except to say that these problems are not caused by a normal increase of users coming to the site to read about the situation unfolding in Boston right now.
Reddit came to national attention yesterday when the Reddit community helped identify the suspects of the bombing after the FBI released pictures of them.
On a comment string asking “Who is attacking reddit?” a visitor named “getamongst” asked “So it’s actually a DDoS? I thought it was just increased load because of the word getting around about the coverage re Boston.”
Redditor “alienth” repled, “The load from the Boston incident was measurable. The attack which is ongoing is orders of magnitude larger. We’re mitigating it the best we can.” “Alienth” also released this picture showing the site crash when the DDoS started.