WordPress.com Hit With Massive DDoS Attack

Fighting the biggest denial of service attack that WordPress.com has ever experienced, Alexis Tsotsis at TechCrunch, which is hosted by the service, posted a story about the ongoing efforts of the blogging platform's parent company to win the digital war. The attack was so large -- tens of millionsof packets and multiple Gigabits per second -- that it affected all three of WordPress.com's server farms.

WordPress did not mention the origin of the attack (DDoS =! Anonymous) and I have contacted founder Matt Mullenweg for more information. WordPress.com currently serves 30 million publishers, including VIPs TED, CBS and TechCrunch, and is responsible for 10% of all websites in the world. WordPress.com itself sees about 300 million unique visits monthly.

Update: Automattic and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg tells us that this is the largest attack WordPress.com has ever seen, and is likely to be politically motivated:

"There's an ongoing DDoS attack that was large enough to impact all three of our datacenters in Chicago, San Antonio, and Dallas -- it's currently been neutralized but it's possible it could flare up again later, which we're taking proactive steps to implement.

This is the largest and most sustained attack we've seen in our 6 year history. We suspect it may have been politically motivated against one of our non-English blogs but we're still investigating and have no definitive evidence yet."

Read the full story at TechCrunch.