Just wanted to drop a quick note here that SlideShare is being hit by DDOS attacks. In fact, this has been happening since last week, and the website has been off-air intermittently during this period. We had been debating internally, whether or not to go public with what’s happening behind the scenes. We decided to come clean as we owe an explanation to our users for our recent outages. Techcrunch broke the story today and the post captures the events fairly well. As one can make out, their seems to be a highly orchestrated attempt to punish the website for having content, that in our opinion is well within the rights of free speech of our users, and does not violate our TOS in any way. Having experienced this first-hand, I can add (to whatever TechCrunch has reported) that all this appears to be part of a well oiled machinery to control internet content. The repeated surreptitious attempts to coax the passwords with obviously untrue stories, the daily dose of take down notices, email spoofing, calling on the office telephone with a threatening demand for the account credentials!

Frankly, given our current traction and focus, we were under-prepared for this kind of an incident, so it has come as a rude shock. But we are getting back to speed (although the site is again experiencing problems as I write this blogpost) and getting prepared for further problems… stay tuned…. will keep you posted.

Update: Here’s a traffic snapshot of the first DDOS attack on SlideShare and the spike it caused. As you can notice, this was many times our normal bandwidth throughput and led to a complete choking of the incoming internet pipes at our webhost. In hindsight, we could have done a few things differently to have avoided this, or mitigated its effect, but that’s only now. Somebody emailed me asking for the technical details of the attack…my apologies, I don’t think I’ll be able to share everything on the blog.