The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has its website attacked by multiple distributed denial of service (DDoS) after TV anchor John Oliver highlighted FCC's plans to roll back net neutrality rules.
On his HBO’s Last Week Tonight show, Oliver urged viewers to head to gofccyourself.com and express their opinions on the topic ahead of the vote.
The mentioned website points to a page on FCC's website where people can fill out a form to share their comments about the net neutrality issue. During the attack, the comment system itself stayed up. However, it tied up the servers and prevented them from responding to people attempting to submit comments.
"Beginning on Sunday night at midnight, our analysis reveals that the FCC was subject to multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks," read a statement from the FCC's CIO, David Bray.
"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 DDoS attack took the website down temporarily. After a while, FCC that was working with its commercial partners to overcome the situation, was able to turn back its website online.
