Administrator quickly mitigates the incident

Sep 29, 2014 12:42 GMT  ·  By

The service offered by the social network Ello suffered a brief downtime this weekend, due to what apparently was a distributed denial-of-service attack.

The website is just starting to gain popularity, or at least awareness, as it has been promoted as the Facebook killer on other platforms, Facebook included. It appears to be a more closed environment that can be accessed at the moment only based on an invitation from a member.

At 4:15PM (EDT) on Sunday, the administrators of Ello posted on the page dedicated to announcing incidents regarding the social network that they were facing a potential denial of service attack.

No other information accompanied the alert, but 35 minutes later another post popped up stating that the problem had been resolved and that the bad IP addresses responsible for sending junk traffic had been blocked.

Earlier on Sunday, at 3:38PM (EDT), the company had informed its users that they were running a database maintenance procedure, which completed in about a minute.

Ello is a new player on the turf of social networking that aims to deliver its members a clutter-free environment, without advertisements. Details about visitors and their activity is not sold to advertisers or data brokers but are collected by the developers in order to improve the service.