Ustream has been unavailable this morning, and Bambuser has been under a heavy load of unusual traffic due to what looks like a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack against both live streaming providers. Ustream issued the following statement via Twitter:
“News Alert: #Ustream is inaccessible due to a large scale DDOS attack targeting Russian opposition channels on Ustream.”
The company wasn’t immediately available for additional details. Ustream said via Twitter that it was able to restore services around 6:30am PT, but at the time of writing, some parts remain unavailable.
A Bambuser spokesperson told us via email that the attack against its site started in the early morning hours, adding:
“What we can see is that we are receiving a lot of unusual traffic with lots of small distributed requests which is different to what we normally see. It’s extremely hard to know who is behind a distributed attack like this, nor do we want to speculate about it at this point.”
It looks like Livestream and Justin.tv weren’t affected by the attack. DDOS attacks are regularly used to suppress opposing views and critical citizen journalism, but these attacks tend to be directed against smaller blogs or dedicated opposition websites. Bambuser told us that this marks the first time its site has been victim of a DDOS attack.
This is a developing story, check back for updates.
Disclosure: GigaOM has a business relationship with Livestream for delivering its conference content.
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