Reddit Rival Voat Decimated by DDoS Attacks

Voat, the Swiss news aggregation and social networking site which saw a surge in users in the wake of the big reddit blackout, has been rendered inactive due to a series of DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks by unknown aggressors. After the recent controversy and user rebellion on reddit, Voat positioned itself as a censorship-free alternative to the popular “front page of the internet”. As of today, however, Voat has been downed by what has been described as a “layer 7 DDoS attack”:

The maintenance on our servers ended several hours ago, but we are still being hit with a layer 7 DDoS attack as Confirmed by CloudFlare.

— Voat (@voatco) July 12, 2015

Voat later issued a statement via its own website:

“In case you were wondering why most third party apps for Voat haven’t been working for the last 8 hours or so – we are under DDoS. Again,” Voat wrote, quoting a CloudFlare support engineer.”

“In order to keep Voat at least somewhat responsive, we’ve bumped up CloudFlare security settings which essentially breaks most Voat third party apps currently on the market. We are sorry about this and we are working on a solution and taking this time to optimise our source code even further. What doesn’t kill you – makes you stronger, right?”

Though the site is now working sporadically, a new page refresh will sometimes yield the message:  “Voat is currently being kicked by a botnet.”

Voat’s stock has been on the rise since problems erupted over on reddit, triggered by the firing of Victoria Taylor, the site’s former Director of Talent, on 2^nd July, who was responsible for arranging the famous AMA (as me anything) posts, allowing users to question celebrities. In a show of defiance to protest the move, 300 of the most popular subreddits were made private for over 24 hours, and CEO Ellen Pao was forced to resign.

Voat has, admittedly, been struggling to cope with the influx of new users, its servers overwhelmed, but the site’s administrators claim that it is not a factor that is affecting the current outages.

Thank you International Business Times for providing us with this information.