Massive DoS Attack Knocks TypePad, LiveJournal Blogs Offline

Millions of blogs hosted by LiveJournal and TypePad were unavailable throughout Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning as a massive denial-of-service attack struck their servers.

The attack that brought down the servers at Six Apart -- the San Francisco company behind the LiveJournal and TypePad services, and the Moveable Type blogging software -- began at 4 p.m. PDT Tuesday, according to an advisory posted to the firm's Web site by Michael Sippey, the vice president of product.

"Six Apart has been the victim of a sophisticated distributed denial of service attack," said Sippey. "This has affected all of Six Apart's sites, causing intermittent and limited availability for TypePad, LiveJournal, TypeKey, sixapart.com, movabletype.org and movabletype.com."

By 11:40 p.m. Tuesday, service had been partially restored, and 3:50 a.m. Wednesday, access was back to normal.

"Our operations staff continues to work with our access providers to monitor the situation," added Sippey.