Readers may have noticed that WUWT was down yesterday for about 30 minutes, the first time in nearly 12 years that the site went completely offline unplanned. Our hourly traffic graph showed the outage:
Our hosting partner, WordPress.com Stopped serving pages from our website. Readers may have noticed that everything was down could not get to any portion of the web site. I was locked out as well. I sent a tweet announcing the problem yesterday morning:
https://t.co/wKHLzzs93x is totally offline as of about 30 minutes ago. Don't know if the constant attacks by AGW/leftist zealots have finally succeeded or if it's a technical issue. The wordpress team is working on it. Thank you for your patience.
— Watts Up With That (@wattsupwiththat) September 14, 2018
A few minutes after I posted that, WordPress support restored WUWT to operation. But, there was damage, and the work I had done to setup a new commenting system has been lost. This is why the popular new features have disappeared.
Please bear with me while I rebuild.
I don’t know if it was a software error, or a malicious attack/exploit but it began in the code/plugin used to enhance the commenting experience.
WUWT gets a lot of attacks, more so than spam. Here’s the count from my Dashboard since early June 2018 when I switched over to the new server.
Thanks for your patience.
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Anthony, thank you for all your hard work for all of us. I did not notice the outage but it is a shame that you had to redo your work. I am sure that this event was some sort of calculated attack on WUWT. The forces of darkness and evil are not happy with the success of WUWT which is a fabulous site and resource!!
Keep up the good work.
In some ways WUWT also helps illustrate some of the very serious failings of both Google and Wikipedia, reminding us all to be cautious about assuming the veracity of so-called trusted sites on the internet: When performing a Google search for WUWT, the side bar serves up the ‘doctored’ Wikipedi page which brazenly asserts
Alongside the WUWT title Google also presents a logo from another site passing-off as WUWT in an attempt to steal internet traffic from WUWT in a manner that would cause most commercial companies to reach for their lawyers. Yes, it's the the site created by that man who shall not be named but whose moniker aims to deceive the unwary into thinking he might be some kind of a respectable Physicist in his day job.
blockquote extended too far in my above post
[Fixed as you intended? .mod]
thanks, mod
I think that the humiliation of the Fake weather/climate MSM…may have caused someone somewhere to react!
Anthony, it could be our next door neighbours! Yes, the same ones who ‘covertly’ use a timed lawn sprinkler between 3:00am & 4:00am – even during drought conditions – yet have 16 x solar panels nailed to their roof. They have the lushest lawn in our village, and the wettest patio, and moistest wooden garden furniture, and wettest empty galvanised garden incinerator in the corner – total hypocrites. Sorry, just had to tell someone.
One thing I noticed last week was that if i entered the WUWT URL in to Google on my phone, it would start to download the main page but then redirect to an ad page. I would then have to press backspace/backpage to get back to the main WUWT main page.
Do you have browser extensions installed? If so, recently? Any extension not “mainstream”?
Did you try without extensions?
Did you try private browsing?
No just a basic install of Google Chrome ages ago that has not been updated.
Light in the darkness. Sanity in a crazy world. WUWT is priceless.
Anthony,
Thanks for working hard to get back the popular new features.
Sorry that the glitch or attack made so much more do-over work for you.
What an amazing number of malicious log-in attempts. Too bad there isn’t a way to identify who is making those attempts. Perhaps logging the IP address of the computer that is making the attempt?
Was thinking the same thing, and that this is more proof of how corrupt the climate alarmists actually are.
WordPress plugins are the cause of most vulns rather then the core code, so it might be worth checking that commenting plugin for any reports of such before reinstalling it.
That would only catch the ones stupid enough to do it directly from their own boxes.
Slightly smarter ones will do it behind a VPN proxy, but can usually still be tracked down if law enforcement gets involved
Someone who logs into one VPN, remote accesses another computer (or a VM on the same one), then logs that one into another VPN (known as “chaining VPNs”) is much harder if not impossible to track. Especially if the first VPN is located where relevant law enforcement has no jurisdiction (e.g. China or Russia). Bouncing a data connection around like this does slow it to a crawl, but password submission packets are a few bytes at most.
Sorry to hear of all the extra work to sort things out and get them back to how you like them.
I’m sure there are many who dislike having there dubious work examined and given some true peer reviewing by others than their chosen cabal and those that disseminate the lies also can’t like having it pointed out what they’re up to.
How you have managed to keep on top of it all is a great testament to you and your helpers hard work, please don’t give up or get put off.
I suggest people donate to show support for this site and the world beating work it does.
James Bull
It’s surprising that it hasn’t happened before. When my father was active he was regularly attacked yet rarely got spam, relatively speaking.
Of course, he wasn’t using WordPress. It was just a business email setup.
Perhaps the new comments code is not worth it? You are under attack.
and i thought privacy possum had done it;-)
new addon from mozilla
glad it wasnt me or my pc
but damn what a lot of work to replace it all
i DO miss the vote up/down and edit already
I actually prefer the old version (as currently available), would only miss edit facility but if the new software is valnurable to attacks why not then stay safe and keep it as it is.
Thanks again for good work and providing a valuable window to sanity.
As much as I love and respect this site, I’m not sure there isn’t a little excess paranoia afloat. We had much of the Web become unreachable. Not only WUWT, but also Amazon, my bank and broker, and several other regularly used sites. Strangely a few things, including the FNN site, continued to come up fine. It lasted a few hours. I assumed it had something to do with the storm in the Carolinas – the Frontier helpline was estimating call wait times greater than 1 hour so I got no good info – and the way different sites are routed. I would certainly hope we haven’t reached the point where someone worked to take WUWT off-line. Looking forward to seeing you all here for a long time. Thank you Anthony.
Of course it’s paranoia on display. Especially as it happened during maintenance or testing of some new feature as Anthony suggested. Any experienced admin knows things can break easily at that moment. Not to mention other downtime causes as you listed.
Unbelievable that rational people are even discussing this with a special article. Lets not go that route again.
On my 10 visitors-a-day, non-controversial site it lists a total of 53,427 malicious attacks blocked. And it doesn’t really matter since when that number is. It shows that everybody gets his fair share of (scripted) attacks, just because you’rethere and using a popular product.
Lets just hope the site author is better with climate statistics and their meaning…. 🙂
I was thinking the same thing. This sort of stuff is constant and everywhere.
I go through this sort of stuff all the time with my customers. People take stuff personally and want to know why someone is targeting them, even when I point out that their whole web hosting provider is down due to a DDOS attack.
Anthony. Thanks for all your work and the work of others who contribute articles that help to keep the blog interesting and informative.
For what it may be worth the WUWT pages we’re looking at today load faster and navigation between pages is faster than the previous version; at least on my computer.
Don’t know what I’d do without you, Anthony.
The world would be a much more difficult place.
Thanks, and thanks for keeping at it.
Veh ani
The REAL reason the site went down is that WP tried out their new server in Sunspot, NM, and things didn’t go quite as planned… 😉
When the flak hits the hardest, you know you’re on the target.
Keep up the good work.
I think the thumbs up/down feature is useful, if it can be put back without too much impact on the site.