When Bots Attack

But 15 minutes later, at 4 pm on May 2, 2006, the sites went dark, and so did the mood at Six Apart, the company that owns them. In the blink of an eye, 10 million blogs and online communities disappeared. "It looked like the servers had freaked out," CEO Barak Berkowitz recalls. Flash floods of data thundered into one network port, stopped inexplicably, then reappeared to overwhelm another. The engineers pored over logs, desperately looking for a cause. After an agonizing hunt, they found it: a distributed denial-of-service attack, or DDoS. Six Apart's servers had been inundated with so many requests that the machines couldn't possibly process them all. It was the digital equivalent of filling a fish tank with a fire hose.