Livejournal has been out for me all morning. I hadn’t seen anything reported on the web, until I removed my English Language filter on the news.
According to Russian News (LiveJournal is owned by Russian company, SUP), there is a distributed Denial of Service attack going on.
This link is routed through Google’s translation page.
http://status.livejournal.com
It started last Friday, I think, went away, then came back yesterday.
So I figure the possibilities as:
1) Personal grudge.
2) Ransom threat.
3) Government attempt to close down a social network which has annoyed them.
4) “It’s so much fun to watch them squirm!” script kiddies. There’s a certain level of immaturity which just likes to break things in something like a nihilist way. If they find a botnet they can use…
I’ve been monitoring Google News for “livejournal.com”. So far all the reports have been from Armenian or Russian news, debating whether or not the Russian State / pro-Kremlin agencies are to blame.
The DDOS continues, off and on, it seems.
I discovered today that the LJ outages were affecting my WordPress Blog, with regard to retrieving icons/avatars of any LJ commenters.
I had always thought that they were cached locally by the blog software, but apparently not that efficiently. When LJ is out, the comments page of my blog was hanging, due to the icon retrieval.
Anyway, have turned off the plugin concerned, and everything is working again.
I’ve managed to solve the caching problem – caching only works if the cache directory has write permissions set. So we once again have LJ icons.