Online URL shortening services provided by Bitly are down due to a DDoS attack and engineers were trying to solve the issues at the time of publishing
Online URL shortening service provided by Bitly was under a major DDoS (distributed denial-of-service attack) on Wednesday.
The website states the problem on a banner on their site and a tweet was put out by the company that its services would be restored eventually. Bitly’s internal team of engineers are working on fixing the problem.
We are currently working to mitigate a DDoS attack. Some of our site may be unavailable, but we’re working to restore full functionality.
— Bitly (@Bitly) February 26, 2014
Services to the links was resumed a little later, however damage from the attack was still being worked on at the time of publishing this article. Bitly, informs on their website, “All links are working after mitigating an earlier DDOS attack. Some link metrics may still be delayed.”
Update: All links are working after mitigating an earlier DDOS attack. Some link metrics may still be delayed.
— Bitly (@Bitly) February 26, 2014
What is DDoS attack?
- Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is an attempt to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users.
- Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of efforts to temporarily or indefinitely interrupt or suspend services of a host connected to the Internet.
- As clarification, DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks are sent by two or more persons, or bots.
- DoS (Denial of Service) attacks are sent by one person or system.
The company Bitly, Inc. was established in 2008 and is privately held and based in New York City. Bitly shortens more than one billion links per month, for use in social networking, SMS, and email services and is relied for accuracy and reliability.
No doubt, this caused some what of a furor online with people even going so far as to refer to this attack as the ‘death of the internet’.
#bitly is down. The internet is dying
— iwyg (@_iwyg_) February 26, 2014
Why are so many #Bitly links failing to open today?? What’s up @hootsuite ??
— Slaweezy (@Slaweezy) February 26, 2014
On no #bitly is down and I haven’t had my fix of web based stats yet for the day #marketingbreakdown
— Steve Scheja-Terry (@Von_Steve) February 26, 2014
The web is collapsing! #bitly is down!
— Ben R. Hodges (@BenHodgesH2O) February 26, 2014
