WordPress sustains massive DDoS attack

Popular blogging platform WordPress was subjected Thursday to a vicious distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

The site, which hosts more than 17 million blogs with 286 million monthly readers, was able to recover as of mid-afternoon EST on Thursday.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, said in a blog post that many users experienced performance or connectivity issues.

Cluley cited an email exchange with a representative of Automattic, operator of WordPress, which said the site was hit with a major DDoS attack that measured "multiple gigabits per second."

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg told TechCrunch that this was the "largest and most sustained attack" the site has had to fight off in its six-year history, affecting all three data centers in the United States.

Mullenweg told the technology blog that he believes the attack may have been politically motivated against a "non-English" blog. He also warned that the attack may return.

An email sent to Mullenweg by SCMagazineUS.com was not immediately returned.