Early this morning, Reddit was bogged down with what was believed to be a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
After over an hour of “technical difficulties”, Reddit confirmed via tweet that a malicious DDoS attack is what caused the downtime, and that they have successfully recovered from it. As an added precaution, they have disabled a few of the site’s functions, and have warned Reddit users that this attack may cause site availability to be intermittent for a while.
Having some technical difficulties right now. We’ll be back ASAP
— reddit status (@redditstatus) April 19, 2013
The source of the DDoS attack was not revealed in any of @redditstatus’ recent tweets. Some speculate, however, that attack comes in response to Reddit users playing detective in the case of the Boston Marathon bombings that happened earlier this week.
Over the past few days, the FindBostonBombers subreddit has been the go-to place for people to throw in their two cents on who they think was responsible for Monday’s attack. To try and control ballooning instances of racial profiling on the thread and minimize the spreading of wrong information, moderators encouraged Redditors to stop posting photos of possible suspects unless they are of the two officially identified by the FBI, who weren’t previously on the online community’s radar. A thread to clear the innocent was also created.
Boston is currently on lockdown, with one of the suspects still at large, at the time of this writing. Many concerned citizens are still sharing information related to the suspect, identified by the FBI as Chechnyan national Dzhokar Tsarnaev, age 19. According to a CBS News tweet, the Boston Police Department is appealing to the social media public to refrain from tapping into police radio frequencies and posting real-time information on the Web.
The FindBostonBombers subreddit is now at 9,097 readers and is still pretty active, despite the site’s sluggishness likely brought on by the DDoS attack.
