Ultimate cause of LJ's recent downtime a DDoS?

[charmian]

http://translate.google.com/#ru|en|http%3A%2F%2Fj.mp%2Fow3oXz Via Google Translate.

Apparently they've concluded it's a DDoS so strong that the backbone providers (Qwest and Verizon) couldn't stand the load, with an avg. traffic load of 6 gigabits.

I'm not sure why another staffer says that posting this is a bad idea. The people behind this know what's going on anyway, and most users will never find out about this anyhow because they won't bother to look.

Other links (in Russian)
http://www.gazeta.ru/news/lastnews/2011/07/27/n_1941485.shtml
http://www.sup.com/news_357.html
http://www.livejournal.ru/themes/id/32601?from=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

The sup.com link may imply that paid users will be compensated for lost time.

[EDIT]

English language link
http://www.panarmenian.net/eng/news/75049/

Comments

[niqaeli]

Thanks for digging up the links. I've signal-boosted a couple of places because I know some people who are really upset by the LJ outage but wouldn't know where to go looking for information.

(I mean, I actually did go looking on the English side of things and couldn't find anything other than the very short status updates on status.livejournal.org that basically only acknowledged that there were some issues.)

[charmian]

Yeah... If you want to find anything about the technical aspects of LJ these days, it's more effective to check the Russian side of the site.

[beck_liz]

Followed niqaeli here from another post. Thank you very much for this information. It helps to know what's happening.

[nebris]

Your icon is evil. lol

~M~

[derryderrydown]

Just an FYI - the traffic load is gigabits, not gigabytes.

[charmian]

Fixed.

[jecook]

In both Qwest's and verizon's defense; 6 Gbit is a *lot* of traffic- It's most of an OC-192 link. (by way of comparison, work's telcom and internet provider only has a OC-48 link to the outside world if I recall correctly.)

Oh, also here via niqaeli as well.

[petronia]

Thanks for this! I'd sort of assumed it was DDoS, but good to get a confirm.

[azurelunatic]

Hot damn, that is a backhoe-scale DDoS!

[this_caia]

Thanks for the info! LJ's status page now says this:

LiveJournal Status

We can now publicly disclose that we have been experiencing a large-scale DDoS attack the last two days, which has been the reason for the site issues most users have been experiencing. The traffic load has been immense, at many times our normal load level, and the attack is still on-going. We are in constant contact with our providers to mitigate the attack as best as possible. We again apologize for the disruption to LiveJournal usage, and are working to get everything back to normal as soon as we can. Thank you!
Status Updated: 2:29 pm GMT (Wednesday, July 27)