Three Theories on Gawker’s Issues

Sister blog AgencySpy was able to narrow down Monday’s issues at Gawker Media to three possibilities.

The first possibility was a server crash, as Gawker’s Nick Denton recently said traffic was higher than ever, so the likelihood of one server being taken down for maintenance and another crashing exists.

The second possibility was a massive traffic spurt to one story, but the issues surfaced Sunday, and traffic tends to be far lighter during weekends, especially during the summer.

The third possibility was a Distributed Denial of Service attack, which is roughly equivalent to “two or 10 people hitting refresh on Gawker millions of times per minute,” as AgencySpy put it.

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