WordPress.com hit by massive DDoS attack

DDoS attacks aren't entirely uncommon nowadays, but the scale of the attack against WordPress.com is truly staggering. CEO Matt Mullenweg told TechCrunch that the attack has affected all three of the company's data centers -- which are located in Chicago, Dallas, and San Antonio. The sites were being blasted by tens of millions of packets (and multiple Gigabits) per second.

Mullenweg says the attacks have been neutralized for now and notes that Automattic is taking precautionary steps to avoid possible aftershocks. As for the cause of the attacks, Mullenweg speculates that they "may have been politically motivated against one of our non-English blogs but we're still investigating and have no definitive evidence yet."

You can check on the current status of the WordPress service on its Public Website Health status page.

Tags: automattic, cms, content, ddos, hosting, publishing, security, web, wordpress