A Denial of Service attack brought down some WordPress.com blogs yesterday, including VIP hosted hotshots like the GigaOM network. The only obvious communication that I could find about this matter was a tweet linking to a blog post about DOS attacks in general, and the actual one in particular, also written by a WordPress.com team representative. Barry wraps up:
We keep hourly traffic metrics and based on those numbers, it looks like during the attack there was about a 5% decrease in overall pageviews during the 40 minutes before traffic was re-routed. All things considered, not a bad outcome for an attack this size. Looking at bandwidth graphs, this attack was in the 500Mbit – 750Mbit/sec range.
That might very well be true, and I can’t say that Automattic didn’t do a good job managing the attack. I do think that the communication with users were poor. For a company into blogging, and a service hosting blogs, I’m surprised to see that the DOS attack isn’t even mentioned on the official blog. I hope Automattic learns to communicate better in the future, because this is just not good enough.
Author: Thord Daniel Hedengren
Thord Daniel Hedengren is a designer, writer, and blogger, and also the former editor of The Blog Herald. He used to be a hotshot in the gaming industry in Sweden, but sold everything and went International. Most recently he wrote a book called Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog, and does loads of kickass design.
That is a HUGE attack!
Although, I don’t see why they would have attacked WordPress, if only to make some bloggers mad. You would think people with those skills would use it in a way that might suit them.
But, then again, it might have.
Um, you’re linking to a blog post and comment from more than 8 months ago and suggesting it’s about a story that happened yesterday? I hope you learn to communicate better in the future, because this is just not good enough. ;)
You are absolutely correct, Matt. I’ve removed the links from the story. I apologize.
It doesn’t change the core facts of the story, though. There has been no official communication of this event other than the tweet, and some staff blogs that people hardly would know about if they don’t dig deep. Why is that?