14 DAY TRIAL // LiveJournal has experienced downtime during the past couple of days because of a massive distributed denial-of-service attack that overwhelmed the company's servers.
The outages began on Tuesday, but the company didn't release a statement until yesterday when it confirmed it was the target of an attack.
"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 company said.
"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," it added.
LiveJournal is one of the oldest blogging platforms, dating back to 1999, and has over 30 million registered accounts. The service remains hugely popular in Russia which accounts for nearly half of its audience.
LiveJournal has come under attack numerous times before, sometimes targeting particular users. Such was the case in April when the service experienced a massive attack that targeted prominent Russian political activist Alexey Navalny.
Navalny maintains a blog where he talks about corruption among the country's politicians. He has exposed several high-profile cases which bothered a lot of influential people.
Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev, who also maintains an active LiveJournal blog, condemned the April DDoS attacks against the platform by calling them outrageous and illegal.
LiveJournal seems to work fine at the moment, but since the current attack is on-going, the service might experience more outages. "We again apologize for the disruption to LiveJournal usage, and are working to get everything back to normal as soon as we can," the company announced.