Reddit s involvement whether good or bad in the hunt for leads in the Boston bombings case does not appear to be the reason for ongoing site outages. For those who can access the service today a banner is informing visitors that site availability continues to be impacted by a malicious DDoS attack.
The company announced that it was experiencing a DDoS early this morning later confirming that the attack was indeed malicious meaning not a result of an influx of organic traffic to the site from those who had come to peruse the many high profile threads discussing the suspects in the Boston bombings case.
As morning drifts into the afternoon the Reddit DDoS now continues though the company reports that it has mitigated part of the DDoS at this time. However certain site functions will be disabled until Reddit has fully recovered the official Reddit Status account informs users.
Naturally there are now several Reddit posts regarding the DDoS with more information. Reddit admin/moderator alienth (aka Reddit Systems Admin Jason Harvey) posts that the site has not seen attacks at this scale before and that the traffic levels are much higher than what the heavily visited Boston thread generated. Orders of magnitude more. Also very obviously fake URLs were being slammed he noted in a post sharing this image (see below) of the DDoS on Reddit s backend systems.
The graph represents the requests that made it to Reddit s secondary load balancing server. What we re facing is orders of magnitude larger than what natural traffic looks like he explains in his post.
Harvey also says that the site is being aided by Akamai its CDN in helping to mitigate the attack.
For those of you who don t understand hacking and DDoS attacks one Redditor in the thread posted a link to this. We think it helps explain
More to come.
Update Though the Reddit Twitter account has not posted an update the site is no longer showing the warning banner and it appears to be functional.
REDDITLaunched in 2005 Reddit is a social news website that displays news based on your personal preferences and what the community likes. Your preferences are determined based on your history of voting stories up or down. The company was started by two University of Virginia grads Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman in the Y Combinator program. Two others Christopher Slowe and Aaron Swartz later joined the team. Conde Nast owner of Wired and other magazines/websites acquired Reddit in October of 2006....
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