If you were having trouble streaming dubstep remixes hosted on SoundCloud lastnight, you’re not the only one. The site fell victim to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, the company confirmed on its status blog today.
The social audio-sharing site experienced several hours of intermittent downtime yesterday as SoundCloud’s engineers fought off the attack.
“Our CTO, VP Engineering, Head of Operations and all available Operations engineering resources have been working around the clock to bring the service back up as soon as possible,” the company said. “We want you all to know that we take this issue very seriously and are doing everything we can to resolve the situation.”
Just the day before, the site experienced similar downtime issues, although it isn’t clear if that was related to the DDoS attack or not. In terms of a motive for the attack, it was likely just the thrill of bringing down an increasingly popular service, rather than the fulfillment of some ideological agenda as we’ve seen in the past with Anonymous and Wikileaks-related DDoS attacks.
As of today, the site appears to be loading and operating without issues.
SoundCloud was founded in Berlin in 2008 as a social networking site primarily for musicians to share and promote their music. It has since grown into an audio-sharing platform for amateur and professional musicians alike, as well as podcasts and other audio snippets. In short, it does for audio what YouTube does for video, albeit on a smaller scale.
