The Federal Communications Commission’s 17-year-old website went down because of high web traffic and old age — not hackers — after a flood of comments following comedian John Oliver’s net neutrality rant, according to a report on The Verge.
“There is insufficient evidence to suggest that the issue was the result of malicious activity, and no FCC data was compromised,” FCC spokesperson Kim Hart told the Daily News Wednesday.
“We received a surge in the volume of visits to our electronic comment filing system last week. A byproduct of the high volume was what is known is a ‘dead record lock,’ where connections in the database create record lock contention and eventually cause the system to freeze. This created difficulty for people trying to submit and search for filed comments.”
On the contrary, Vice is reporting that attackers brought the site down, citing a 40-fold increase of dead-record locks to their system compared to a typical day as possibly being caused by an automated script.
The website originally went down after Oliver’s 13-minute net neutrality rant during the June 1 episode of his “Last Week Tonight” program, during which Oliver called on Internet users to flood the FCC’s comment section.
The FCC put out a Twitter post the day after stating that they were experiencing technical difficulties with their comment system due to heavy traffic.
An FCC spokesperson told The Verge that any number of things could have caused the error, due to the site’s age.
“It’s not set up to receive the load of comments we received last week,” the spokesperson said in The Verge’s report.
While the website was down, the public was temporarily prevented from filing comments to the website.
Hart told the Daily News that comments can also be received via email to openinternet@fcc.gov, which can still be used should the website have any issues. Hart also told The News that the agency’s IT department is working to devote more resources toward that section of their website to keep up with the demand.
Oliver’s net neutrality rant urged commenters to call for the FCC to not abandon net neutrality, or equal access to the Internet. The FCC approved a proposal for open Internet rules in May that would ban Internet service providers from slowing down access to consumers, but may allow for content providers such as Netflix to pay for more reliable access to those same consumers.
The tentative rules were approved 3-2 by the FCC’s commissioners, and are in a 60-day initial public comment period through July 15 followed by a period for reply comments through Sept. 10. A final vote is not expected to take place until the end of the year.
The proposed rules are available for review on the FCC’s website, where public comments can also be filed.
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