Earlier this week, NYC-based Gawker Media suffered a denial-of-service attack which limited access to the company’s blogs. Anna Holmes, editor of the company’s women-focused Jezebel blog, noted that the attack provided the Web site’s bloggers with a “much-needed break,” urging her writers to “ease up” until the company’s IT team had the attack under control.
In an internal memo, Gawker Media’s CTO Thomas Plunkett said that the denial-of-service attack was aimed at Consumerist, the former Gawker-Media owned Web site now owned by the Consumers Union. Gawker Media still hosts that site’s content. The limited access to the other sites was “collateral damage.”
Consumers Union disputed this remark, saying through a spokesperson that it was “unclear” that Consumerist was in fact the target. What’s also unclear is when Gawker Media shifted the hosting of its content from its Budapest office to NYC-based Datagram, the target of the attacks. As recently as July, Gawker Editor-in-Chief Gabriel Snyder was praising the company’s Budapest-based tech team for its work on implementing a new comment system across all of the sites. The Times‘ coverage also contained no information if other Datagram-hosted Web sites were effected.