Tether Website Screams 'Im Under Attack' As Malicious Actors Launch DDoS Ambush

The official website of Tether, the stablecoin cryptocurrency hosted on Bitcoin, Ethereum and other blockchains, is in "I'm under attack" mode following a DDoS ambush it faced over the weekend.

Tether CTO Paolo Ardoino confirmed that the official website suffered from a DDoS attack over the weekend, adding that the malicious actors have sent a ransom request to stop the attack. The executive explained that on a normal day, the website receives around 2,000 requests per five minutes but since the attack, it has been receiving about 8 million requests per five minutes.

"This morning @Tether_to received a ransom request to avoid mass DDOSes. They tried already once. On a normal day, we have around 2k reqs/5min. The attack brought us to 8M reqs/5min," the CTO tweeted. Ardoino confirmed in the same Twitter thread that the attack has been mitigated but decided to leave the "I'm under attack" mode enabled on the website to dampen further risk.

The executive, however, clarified that despite the enabled mode, which is a feature of Cloudfare's DNS management service, users can still process their transactions as it "won't affect the ability to redeem."

But, it looks like some Twitter users are not convinced of the DDoS attack on Tether's official website. One user, who goes by the name @daveDangerous7 called the attack "fake" and said that it is a "good way to avoid having to do redemptions," raising a suspicion that " the last $60bn has actually been stolen."

Another user who goes by the Twitter handle Alexjoness said, "so it begins. interesting narrative you're trying to build here once this all collapses. I wonder if you'll be successful in convincing people that this was all an attack." Twitter user stclineman opined: "He’s tweeting this so later when $USDT crashed he can stand up in court and say 'See I tried to warn them'."

Tether has been under fire for several weeks and in a blog post titled "Tether Condemns False Rumours About Its Commercial Paper Holdings," it claimed that rumors against the company were spread to "induce panic."

Tether was trading up at 0.01 percent $0.9987 with a 24-hour volume of $56,027,988,771 as of 1:55 a.m. ET on Monday based on the data from CoinMarketCap.