Just got a note from the WordPress VIP folks that WordPress.com is suffering through a distributed denial of service attack, which is making sites hard to access, both on the front and back ends — and I’ve definitely noticed things being slow on the back end. So if for some reason Whatever is hard to reach today, or you had to try a couple of times to get to it, that’s why. It’s not me, it’s all of WordPress. Hopefully this will be resolved soon.
Update, 4:17pm: Apparently everything’s groovy now.
I got an e-mail from Microsoft offering me a last chance to move from Live Spaces to WordPress. Even if I didn’t even have a Spaces blog, I clicked through to migrate whatever was in there to a new WordPress account. Maybe everyone is doing that right now and it’s overloading their servers?
No, they wouldn’t have called that a DDoS attack.
I’ve noticed the same on some boating sites I moderate — getting hit with a high percentage of “new members” that are embarassingly bad SPAM registration scripts as well. It’s too early for the Ides of March, though!.
Sigh…. what makes people think these kinds of sheenanigans are “fun”?
It’s possible this isn’t just something being done by some pranksters on a lark. The akismet anti-spam system that WordPress supports has been offline off and on all morning due to being unable to get to its database, and I’m getting an unusual number of attempted spam comments, some of which are actually getting through so that I have to weed them out by hand. The culprits might be making a coordinated attempt to stick spam onto a lot of blogs that they normally wouldn’t have access to.
This site came up fine just now for me.
Zipping along fine here from the Seattle area…