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Reddit slammed by massive online attack

Reddit, the 'front page of the Internet,' is under a heavy distributed denial-of-service attack today.

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Reuters
An image displays what a DDoS attack can look like. This was a DDoS on Spamhaus, an anti-spam organization.
  • By Aimee Ortiz

Reddit suffered a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack Friday that stretched into the afternoon.

At 6:02 a.m., the Reddit status Twitter account tweeted that the website was working to recover from what appeared to be a DDoS. A DDoS is when a botnet is sent out to cripple a server or to steal information from it. The source of the attack has not yet been announced.

A Reddit admin that goes by the username Alienth stated on an AskReddit thread that the person or people attacking the site have “a lot of time and bandwidth on their hands.” Alienth posted a graph of Reddit’s server load, claiming that none of the admins had ever seen an attack at this scale.

"All we know is it is blatantly malicious," says a Reddit representative, according to The Huffington Post.

The attack on Reddit comes the morning that Boston has shutdown as a citywide manhunt continues for one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects. Reddit users had been actively pursuing and trying to help solve the bombing. The Internet sleuths offered high-res pictures and information with regards to the case. The users’ interests, however, did not always end successfully. Their own investigations have led to false accusations. As the manhunt began on Friday, Reddit featured a live stream of the breaking events. It is still unclear whether Friday’s events have anything to do with the DDoS attack on Reddit.

Reddit, in the meantime, has stated that it managed to “mitigate part of the DDoS at this time” but that “certain site functions are disabled.”

“The Internet’s not working. Or at least the self-styled ‘front page of the Internet,' ” writes VentureBeat’s John Koetsier. “One thing seems to be clear: The outages are deliberate, not simply caused by a flood of traffic from the ongoing Boston manhunt for the marathon bomber who remains at large.”

Reddit is working for the most part, but the site can be slow to load. For now, the website continues to handle the attack. 

For more tech news, follow Aimee on Twitter, @aimee_ortiz

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