Ello went temporarily dark over the weekend due to a possible distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack by an unknown actor. Total downtime: 45 minutes.
See also: What The Ell Is Ello? The Ad-Free Social Network Everyone’s Talking About
DDOS attacks flood servers with fake connection requests, frequently overloading them and forcing them off the Web. This was the new social network’s first major outage.
Ello, which promises an ad-free, pseudonymous-optional environment, recently rose to popularity at the same time that its largest competitor, Facebook, was promising the opposite experience. “You are not a product,” reads Ello’s manifesto.
The resulting popularity surge led to the site fielding more than 34,000 Ello invite requests every hour. To avoid a freeze on new users it reportedly considered, Ello limited invitations to five per member. eBay users capitalized by hiking invite prices up to $100.
According to Ello Status, the “potential denial of service attack” was resolved by blocking the IP addresses of malicious individuals on Sunday afternoon.
Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock
