WASHINGTON—FCC Chief Information Officer Dr. David Barry issued a statement in regards to the cause of delays consumers have experienced recently when trying to file comments on the FCC’s Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS), claiming that the commission was subject to multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDos).
“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 Barry. “These actors were not attempting to file comments themselves; rather they made it difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file with the FCC. While the comment system remained up and running the entire time, these DDos events tied up the servers and prevented them from responding to people attempting to submit comments. We have worked with our commercial partners to address this situation and will continue to monitor developments going forward.”
According to Barry, these DDos attacks began Sunday, May 7, at midnight.
