The first time late-night comedian John Oliver asked America's internet fans to flood the Federal Communications Commission website with comments in support of net neutrality, in 2014, they apparently did, and the FCC website quickly crashed from the traffic. Oliver renewed the call on Sunday night's Last Week Tonight, now that new FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is proposing to scale back the hard-fought net neutrality rules; Oliver even created a new site that directs you to the relevant FCC comment section. And sure enough, on Sunday night and early Monday, starting about half an hour after Last Week Tonight aired, the FCC's comment section was unreachable.
But that wasn't due to John Oliver fans, the FCC said Monday. "These were deliberate attempts by external actors to bombard the FCC's comment system with a high amount of traffic to our commercial cloud host," said FCC Chief Information Officer David Bray. "These actors were not attempting to file comments themselves; rather they made it difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file with the FCC."
Not everybody was convinced by the DDoS attack explanation. The timing was just too much of a coincidence, Fight for the Future campaign director Evan Greer told The Washington Post. "The FCC should immediately release its logs to an independent security analyst or major news outlet to verify exactly what happened last night."
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
In any case, the public comment section is back online, should you want to express your support or opposition to Pai's push to make net neutrality more of a voluntary proposition. And if you aren't quite sure what the fuss is about, you can watch (or rewatch) the (NSFW) John Oliver explainer below. Peter Weber
-
Groypers: the alt-right group pulled into the foregroundThe Explainer The network is led by alt-right activist Nick Fuentes
-
10 concert tours to see this upcoming fallThe Week Recommends Concert tour season isn't over. Check out these headliners.
-
How to put student loan payments on pauseThe Explainer If you are starting to worry about missing payments, deferment and forbearance can help
-
New York court tosses Trump's $500M fraud fineSpeed Read A divided appeals court threw out a hefty penalty against President Trump for fraudulently inflating his wealth
-
Trump said to seek government stake in IntelSpeed Read The president and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan reportedly discussed the proposal at a recent meeting
-
US to take 15% cut of AI chip sales to ChinaSpeed Read Nvidia and AMD will pay the Trump administration 15% of their revenue from selling artificial intelligence chips to China
-
NFL gets ESPN stake in deal with DisneySpeed Read The deal gives the NFL a 10% stake in Disney's ESPN sports empire and gives ESPN ownership of NFL Network
-
Samsung to make Tesla chips in $16.5B dealSpeed Read Tesla has signed a deal to get its next-generation chips from Samsung
-
FCC greenlights $8B Paramount-Skydance mergerSpeed Read The Federal Communications Commission will allow Paramount to merge with the Hollywood studio Skydance
-
Tesla reports plummeting profitsSpeed Read The company may soon face more problems with the expiration of federal electric vehicle tax credits
-
Dollar faces historic slump as stocks hit new highSpeed Read While stocks have recovered post-Trump tariffs, the dollar has weakened more than 10% this year
