As you may have noticed, for the last few hours, the site steemit.com doesn't load. According to a post (@sneak/steemit-com-is-experiencing-a-ddos-attack) by head developer @sneak, the site is experiencing a DDoS attack.
While this is certainly not funny, the good news is that the data, or the backend layer of the Steem ecosystem is working very well. How is this possible?
Well, the website steemit.com is just one way of exploring the blockchain. It's like a filter put on top of that data. And it's that filter that is right now obfuscated by this attack, not the actual blockchain.
There are many ways in which you can explore the Steem blockchain, and I can assure, as a witness, that the blockchain works absolutely normal.
A website, which is hosted on a single server, is easier to attack, because it has a single point of failure, whereas a blockchain is made up by a collection of distributed nodes: seed nodes, content nodes and witness nodes. As a witness on the Steemit network I can assure you, again, that the witnesses are continuing to produce blocks.
Wether or not this attack is connected to the latest phishing attack that was revealed yesterday, we don't know. Correlation is not causation, so for the moment I will refrain from any judgement.
Until the main distribution channel of the Steem blockchain, steemit.com, is restored, please user busy.org (from where I'm posting right now) or chainbb.com.
Also, don't believe anything you hear, there is a lot of FUD going on.
Steem on!