As you may have noticed, for the last few hours, the site steemit.com doesn't load. According to a post (https://busy.org/steemit/@sneak/steemit-com-is-experiencing-a-ddos-attack) by head developer @sneak, the site is experiencing a DDoS attack.
While this is certainly not funny, the good news is that the data, or the backend layer of the Steem ecosystem is working very well. How is this possible?
Well, the website steemit.com is just one way of exploring the blockchain. It's like a filter put on top of that data. And it's that filter that is right now obfuscated by this attack, not the actual blockchain.
There are many ways in which you can explore the Steem blockchain, and I can assure, as a witness, that the blockchain works absolutely normal.
A website, which is hosted on a single server, is easier to attack, because it has a single point of failure, whereas a blockchain is made up by a collection of distributed nodes: seed nodes, content nodes and witness nodes. As a witness on the Steemit network I can assure you, again, that the witnesses are continuing to produce blocks.
Wether or not this attack is connected to the latest phishing attack that was revealed yesterday, we don't know. Correlation is not causation, so for the moment I will refrain from any judgement.
Until the main distribution channel of the Steem blockchain, steemit.com, is restored, please user busy.org (from where I'm posting right now) or chainbb.com.
Also, don't believe anything you hear, there is a lot of FUD going on.
Steem on!
Great explanation and much appreciated. I had never heard of a DDos attack until today and didn't realize exactly was at play here. Very glad to know the Steem block chain is chugging right along per usual and all is good. Thanks again.
I just did a little experiment. Like almost everyone, steemit wasn't working for me. I then used a VPN and changed location from US to Mexico. Mexico works and US doesn't when using a VPN. I then retested my location without VPN and no go. Don't know what it means, but there it is.
SO MUCH FUD!! I am basically repeating in the chats, "Everything is fine, your wallet is fine, steem is fine, be calm."
This may have been a reaction to all of the positive press that steem got this week - somebody from another camp could have gotten worried and DDOS'd steemit to try and turn people away. No way to know for sure until we hear from sneak or another of the higher-ups...
Best to stay calm and steem on for now :-)
Thank you for the info, I have found the website glitchy and slow for a few days now, is this connected to the ddos?
Very correct and timely post @dragosroua i also in solidarity edited my earlier post and updated this ddos attack issue in my blog post...i know it's due to envy because of success of steemit and maybe future growth due to SMT announcements and many others...we will keep steeming hot and let haters go hug a transformer...😎
is there any way to prevent this in the future?
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I believe it is related to the fact that a certain piece of knowledge was released about Steemit and that it is humans trying to get "views." I did it on my last post and got a bunch of views just to see if it was relevant.
nice post @dragosroua, it's great that steem blockchain is save and witnesses are continuing to produce blocks, i hope the devs are working and problem with steemit.com should solved soon.
I noticed it too and i was really wondering what was happening.
Thanks I notices it was not working for a while. Now we know why.
Thanks Dragos 4 keeping us informed and would appreciate an update whenever that may be appropriate.
Thanks Again...
Cheers !!
great info ..
Thanks for the info.... I'm glad it's safe and back
I guess it's better to have things like this happen early on to see how well Steemit is able to handle it, rather than finding out later it doesn't have significant protection against these attacks...
thanks for the update.
Well, the silver lining to this is lots of folks are discovering busy.org. I have mixed feelings about editing posts over here but it's nice to understand there are different ways of cooking our goose. I'm off to give chainbb a try now, thanks to your tip.
what a day yesterday was totally down for me for the whole day !!