Why Is Tumblr Down? Possible DDoS Attack Could Be Responsible, Users Say

Social media users shared their frustration Wednesday when popular blogging site Tumblr appeared to be offline in the U.S. and Europe. Some speculated whether it was the result of a massive cyberattack.

Websites such as Is It Down Right Now? began to report service interruptions Wednesday afternoon. Malware Tech, a U.K.-based blog dedicated toward "Malware Analysis, Security News and Reverse Engineering" claimed via social media that the outage was the result of a massive distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS attack. Those attacks occur when multiple infected systems flood a single target with traffic, paralyzing its servers.

Tumblr was one of a number of major websites that were targeted by an Oct. 21 DDoS attack. Large sites such as Netflix, Twitter, CNN and Fox News were affected when large-scale DDoS attacks struck Dyn and Amazon, both of which control large shares of the internet's domain name servers. Users attempting Wednesday to load Tumblr were directed to an error screen that read "service is temporarily unavailable."

Fans of the animated Japanese sports television show Yuri On Ice were particularly vocal about the issue and many considered a coinciding finale of the series to be the true reason the site had crashed. Earlier Wednesday,Tumblr hosted a Q&A session on Aleppo and the conflict in Syria with Adnan Zulfiqar of the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

The company first issued a statement via Twitter in response to the ongoing incident saying, "Some users are experiencing latency affecting the dashboard. We’ll get it fixed ASAP."

The tweet was later deleted and Tumblr instead wrote, "Users are still experiencing slow load times on the dashboard, on both web + mobile. We’ll let you know when everything’s fixed. Hang tight."

Cyber security has been a hot topic in U.S. politics since the CIA and FBI accused Russia of hacking the emails of Democratic Party members ahead of the presidential election. Sensitive information was leaked by whistleblower organization Wikileaks in what authorities as well as President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have claimed was an attempt by Moscow to influence the election. Russia and President-elect Donald Trump have repeatedly denied these accusations.