August 18, 2014 12:26 PM UTC

Pardon the Mess: Denial of Service Attack on Colorado Pols

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• by: Colorado Pols

A quick note to apologize again for downtime this morning–a very large amount of traffic swamped the site moments ago, forcing our system administrations to block all access to our database. Some users received a "site suspended" message as a result of the temporary blocking of database access calls.

Our hosting company is presently working to determine the origin of this large spurt of traffic, but it appears consistent initially with what's known in the industry as a "denial of service" attack–an attack where web servers are flooded with bogus requests to deny access to legitimate users. Such attacks can be difficult to precisely determine based on their distributed nature, often taking advantage of thousands of infected computers to flood servers–which looks maddeningly similar to normal web traffic. Regardless of what you might call this, we understand from our hosts that this is almost certainly intentional.

We've been working to manage trouble that crops up from time to time with our WordPress installation, but by all accounts this appears to be different, so we're taking the unusual step of letting people know what happened. Should it recur, or become a major ongoing problem for us, it's possible there is a…nontechnical aspect to what's happening. We don't know that yet, but if we find out that's what's happening, we'll be a lot more vocal.

In the meantime, carry on.