Reddit faces outages in midst of DDoS attack

Reddit is experiencing intermittent outages apparently due to a malicious DDoS attack.

People trying to access the site, which labels itself “the front page of the internet”, were greeted with the following image:

Anyone who did manage to access the site meanwhile was greeted with a warning stating that: “Site availability is being impacted by a malicious DDoS attack. Please stay tuned”.

Heavy traffic

There were thoughts that the outage was due to heavy traffic around the Watertown shootings which took place near Boston, USA today. A Reddit thread had been live-posting a police feed regarding the incidents which took place in the town.

That appears to have been debunked by the notice on the site as well as a Twitter feed which tracks the current state of Reddit’s servers.

Site availability continues to be impacted by a malicious DDoS attack.

— reddit status (@redditstatus) April 19, 2013

We’ve recovered from the DDoS, at this time.

— reddit status (@redditstatus) April 19, 2013

We are still working on mitigating a malicious DDoS attack. Please stay tuned.

— reddit status (@redditstatus) April 19, 2013

At this stage, no one has come forward to take responsibility for the attack. The YourAnonNews account did however appear to be taking a modicum of pleasure in the site’s outage:

@reddit #FAIL

— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) April 19, 2013

Reddit has received a lot of media attention over the past couple of days, as its members scoured photographs of the Boston Marathon finish line, where two explosions caused three deaths and hundreds of injuries earlier this week. Their attempts to find suspects were criticized in some sectors, with people pointing out that the Redditors could be engaging in trial by suspect and that elements of racism have already crept into the investigations.