So over the last 18 hours we’ve had sporadic downtime. It’s true. Let me explain what happened…

Fluther uses Slicehost to provide servers. Those servers are located in a datacenter in St. Louis along with hundred of other servers belonging to many other companies. A website (which Slicehost didn’t name) that wasn’t us came under a distributed denial of service attack. That attack was so massive it saturated the network for the entire datacenter, denying service to all the websites hosted in Slicehost’s STL-A datacenter. We were unfortunately just collateral damage in that attack. Slicehost is on top of the issue right now and let me just say DDoS attacks are not easy to resolve so kudos to the engineers on duty for their hard (and continuing) work.

In the future—when things like this happen—we’ll post updates via Facebook and Twitter:

• You should follow us on Twitter here.
• You should add Fluther as a fan on Facebook here.

(We moved the feed of Fluther questions to the @fluther_newborn account.)