The FCC says it was targeted by DDoS attacks Sunday and Monday, which took down the comment system

May 8, 2017 19:58 GMT  ·  By

It looks like it may not have been just John Oliver's "fault" for the FCC site taking a dive on Sunday night and Monday morning, but rather a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. 

On Sunday night, John Oliver took it upon himself, once more, to urge people to go tell the FCC to protect net neutrality after Ajit Pai, the new chairman, revealed that it had plans to scrape pretty much everything his predecessor did. Three years ago, Oliver did the same and the FCC site suffered quite a bit from the large flow of people visiting the site to speak their minds about the issue.

It was, therefore, believed that FCC's outage on Sunday night and Monday morning was due to the high number of visitors. The FCC denies this, though.

DDoS attacks targeting the FCC

"Beginning on Sunday night at midnight, our analysis reveals that the FCC was subject to multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks. These were deliberate attempts by external actors to bombard the FCC's comment system with a high amount of traffic to our commercial cloud host. These actors were not attempting to file comments themselves; rather they made it difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file with the FCC," the commission's CIO David Bray said in a statement.

Since John Oliver's feat three years ago of taking down the FCC site, they've bolstered the ECFS in order to be more prepared for such instances of high number of visitors. There are some 180,000 comments filed this time around in the hope that Pai will change his mind about the direction he wants to take the FCC, choosing to protect consumers' interest and not those of the giant telecommunications companies.