The self-styled “front page of the Internet” was not working for some time, as the site itself underwent a flood of traffic that has been attributed to what is known as a “distributed denial of service attack”, or a malicious DDoS attack in short, which resulted in the social site’s servers huffing and puffing away as it tried to keep up. Needless to say, there were certain quarters who speculated that this could be due to the massive Boston manhunt traffic, but Reddit says otherwise. Not much information has been released on who is responsible behind the DDoS attack, as nobody decided to step forward and proudly (I use the term here rather loosely) announce that they are the ones behind it.
According to a Reddit employee who called himself “alienth,” he claimed that “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.” Partial service has since been restored after its outage happened, and as at press time, Reddit is purring away like a newly serviced engine. We have seen our fair share of outages in the past, too, and are glad that none of them proved to be beyond redemption.
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