Linode, the cloud hosting company hosting leadstories.com (and many other websites), has been the victim of an ongoing distributed denial-of-service attack (DDOS) since Christmas. According to the company's status page the attacks seem to have varied in target and intensity, occassionaly bringing down one or more of its eight datacenters for short periods of time over the past week.
Today has been an especially hard day for them with the Atlanta datacenter unavailable for up to 16 hours at a time. This is quite unfortunate for us here at Lead Stories too, since we are hosted there. If you haven't been able to reach our website recently, now you know why.
Linode claims to host over 580,000 websites for its customers on its LinkedIn page, all of these are potentially affected by the attack. At the moment it is still unclear who is behind the attack or what the motive is. There is speculation about a ransom demand or involvement of a state (given the size and scope of the attacks) but no concrete information is available at this time. We have reached out to Linode for comment and we will update this story when we hear more.
