Color me confused. I don’t know why anyone would attack WordPress, the popular home of almost 18-million blogs, but they did, and for several hours on March 3rd, WordPress was out of commission.
According to Sara Rosso, VIP Services Engineer at Automattic, WordPress.com’s owner,” WordPress.com is currently being targeted by an extremely large Distributed Denial of Service [DDoS] attack which is affecting connectivity in some cases. The size of the attack is multiple Gigabits per second and tens of millions of packets per second.”
She added, “We are working to mitigate the attack, but because of the extreme size, it is proving rather difficult. At this time, everything should be back to normal as the attack has subsided, but we are actively working with our upstream providers on measures to prevent such attacks from affecting connectivity going forward.”
The attack began at approximately 6 AM Eastern time. WordPress started recovering by noon, and by about 3:30 PM the system was back to normal.