LJ Situation Seems to Be Caused by Powerful DDoS Attack

naraht points to posts by charmian and gehayi that cite Russian language news releases from SUP (LJ's parent company) that describe "a DDoS so strong that the backbone providers (Qwest and Verizon) couldn't stand the load, with an avg. traffic load of 6 gigabytes."

A machine translation of a part of one of the releases says

"Separately, we note that the recipients are not popular DDoS bloggers, the attackers are attacking IP service, thus, an attack aimed at LiveJournal as a whole. As we have noted in previous attacks, we have installed high-efficiency equipment, after the attacks in March and April, we purchased and installed additional hardware, software and increased bandwidth, which helped to counter a much larger loads, but now the attackers have changed tactics and impact on supplier relations."

My interp of this is that apparently the attackers are no longer targeting specific bloggers - they are concentrating their attacks so as to cause disruption at the ISP level.

DDoS Attack v. LJ Confirmed

LJ Status was just updated:

We can now publicly disclose that we have been experiencing a large-scale DDoS attack the last two days, which has been the reason for the site issues most users have been experiencing. The traffic load has been immense, at many times our normal load level, and the attack is still on-going. We are in constant contact with our providers to mitigate the attack as best as possible. We again apologize for the disruption to LiveJournal usage, and are working to get everything back to normal as soon as we can. Thank you!

I Got into LJ with Firefox, at Last

Clearing caches and all that didn't help. What finally did help was going into my Preferences and manually removing all the cookies from LJ.

It's still slow and balky as all get-out - Safari is working better in that regard - but somehow the fact that I got in makes me much happier.

(Especially after someone managed to stick a spam comment on my LJ ... when I still couldn't get in!)