WordPress.com Slows While Battling DDOS Attack

WordPress.com, which hosts this site, was targeted by a distributed denial of service attack today. Users reported extreme slowness this morning, and Automattic switched hosted blogs into read-only mode while combating the attack, according to a post on its support forum.

The company told VIP users the attack was “extremely large,” describing it as “multiple Gigabits per second and tens of millions of packets per second.”

Automattic said it had fixed the slowness early this morning, but it apparently flared up again a few hours later, according to the WordPress.com Twitter timeline.

Automattic has said it receives DDOS attacks frequently, but is usually able to contain them from affecting users. (The chart pictured here is from a previous attack.)

At this point we don’t believe AllThingsDigital was affected by the attack.