Distributed Denial Of Service - some hackers or softwareproblems creating countless requests to the server at the same time so that the server can't answer them or even collapses - that is why we couldn't log in to Steemit or even open the page on our browsers
but the good thing about steem: the blockchain, where all the transfers are saved is decentralized, i.e. it is stored on several servers (witness nodes) so that it is nearly unhackable... (you will need a lot of high qualified people trying to hack a bunch of nodes at the same time) - just the backendpage (Steemit.com) was offended... that can happen to every weppage
Thank you for the answer..so the problem was caused by people overwhelming the sever you say? How many servers are there?
This question I can't answer but having nearly 400k members there will be some server capacity I guess... so there were indeed some hackers sending the countless requests - this isn't unusual for bigger pages - in deed it's near to some kind of award, because page is so big, that hackers think it would be profitable to kidnap the server to extort some money of the company... by the way it is quiet easy to run those attacks - contrary to really hack into such servers especially on servers of nerds like the ones who run steemit ;)
Do all servers have the same capacity? And are some serves designated specifically to certain websites?
Which Servers do you mean ? I don't know the setup at Steemit.com - even not if the run own Servers or have delegated this to external service...
But in priciple every Server is different as every PC and Laptotp is, although there are some standarts.
I just like understanding how things work! ;)