The following is a chat room excerpt which explains why steemit.com is down right now, has been since yesterday, what you can do about it to keep steeming on and why your wallet and data are still safe. It has been edited to remove other user's names and unrelated, interleaved messages from the chat room, but I wanted to get something posted, without delay to keep my friends informed, and not bother to clean it up too much to save time to the wire on getting this out.
POST PUBLICATION EDIT/UPDATE FROM ANOTHER ANON CHAT USER:
apparently, "The devs attempted to add a feature to track user interactions on the site, it relied on a third party, and when that service went down, it caused an infinite loop of requests on the chain, this caused the server for Steemit.com to fail. They are working to roll-back the changes and stabilize the web-server nodes."
THEY CAUSED THEIR OWN DDOS ON THEMSELVES. UGH! Read on for assurances of the safety of your wallet and data, as well as alternatives you can use to keep on steeming.
SirCork-Today at 8:17 AM
I was just notified seconds ago that steemit has been attacked once again by a DDOS attack DDOS = Distributed Denial Of Service
This is when bot slave networks are used to send massive amounts of traffic to an endpoint, in this case steemit RPC nodes, which interface the blogging site to the block chain and overwhelm it's service capabilities
it's telling a webserver that might be able to handle a million hits a minute, to send a trillion - hypothetical example numbers aside in layman's terms ^
Service will be intermittent until the attack subsides or other mitigation can occur, such as re-routing services to backup devices and alternate DNS routes.
don't worry, the block chain is unaffected and all other sites besides steemit seem to functional under normal conditions.
all that is affected is the poorly executed and relatively unprotected steemit.com user interface. These guys have so many amateur oversights in this user interface and across the user experience that it really is unfathomable at times to be how it can be so bad. It's like they pay beginner developers to build this thing.
Things like having no user confirmations on important interactions (literally one short line of code would be better than the none they have now, to ask a user to confirm a submission button click on say a wallet transaction or a witness vote/unvote)
Even putting up a quick "hey, we are under attack or maintenance" type page seems to escape these guy's capabilities. I know first year developers who do a better job. Ugh, it's depressing.
SirCork-Today at 8:26 AM
so if you are super in need of a read or write fix, busy.org and chainbb.com remain functional
also if you are super nerdy you can also use alternate RPC nodes, with the mobile esteem app
You can use eSteem application with any live websocket for example: wss://gtg.steem.house:8090, wss://seed.bitcoiner.me, wss://steemd.privex.io or many others.
The attack is only on steemit nodes apparently.
I don't use esteem, busy or chainbb, but I can read there, and news channels will probably continue to have blog posts about the issue so you can follow along
[Another user asks for laymens terms]
SirCork-Today at 8:28 AM
there are machines listening to requests/sending responses to the usersa bot army shows up and starts making hundreds of thousands of requests a secondand the servers melt downtrying to answerswer each you are going to quickly be unable to serve them all
AnonChatUser-Today at 8:29 AM
you should turn that into an article SirCork
SirCork-Today at 8:29 AM
there are machines listening to requests/sending responses to the users
a bot army shows up and starts making hundreds of thousands of requests a second and the servers melt down trying to answer
AnonChatUser-Today at 8:29 AM
You realize everyone who isn't techy will be asking. And that explanation makes a lot of sense. So write a DDOS for dummies article and post it when things work.
SirCork-Today at 8:29 AM
no, I don't normally write technical articles for good reason, I do NOT want that reputation here because this stuff makes even MY eyes glaze over and I have been the go-to guy for newb questions for 35 years.
I'm over it.
AnonChatUser-Today at 8:30 AM
but your explanation wasn't technical. That's what I mean.Ah, yes.
SirCork-Today at 8:30 AM
yeah, that's how I makes my money
AnonChatUser-Today at 8:30 AM
We won't make you become that. No worries
SirCork-Today at 8:31 AM
as such, ugh. so thanks, please don't. :)