An ongoing DDoS attack on Reddit continues through Friday thus far but seems unrelated to the barrage of photo and video the site has received about the Boston bombings.
A banner on the site is informing visitors that "site availability continues to be impacted by a malicious DDoS attack." The company stated earlier this morning it was under attack and confirmed the intent was malicious. A malicious DDoS or distributed denial of service attack occurs when a large inflow interrupts a website's connection, making the website inaccessible or slow. The attack isn't related to an influx of people viewing the site on the subpost about the Boston attacks.
"All we know is it is blatantly malicious," a Reddit representative told the Huffington Post. While some features are back on, the company continues to be affected by the attack. It's unclear why the attack is being perpetrated and who is doing it. The company is working with its CDN provider to mitigate the attack.
The company has been under fire for its subthread on the bombings during the Boston Marathon. After the bombings, users began posting video and images, singling out people they thought looked suspicious and asking the public to find the people.
Many others have said the thread was tantamount to a witchhunt and could endanger innocent people. A post on the thread landed a high school runner as a possible suspect on the front page of the New York Post.
"Orders of magnitude more. Also very obviously fake URLs were being slammed," Reddit Systems Admin Jason Harvey, also known as Reddit admin/moderator "alienth," noted in a post on the site.
Launched in 2005, Reddit is a social news website that displays news based on personal preferences and what the community likes. Downvoting or upvoting a post determines how many people view it.
