Disabled service affected WordPress hosted services over the weekend through Tuesday.
Over the weekend the WordPress.com blog hosting services had a denial-of-service (DoS) issue that prevented users from logging into their blogs for several days. The spokesman for Automattic, Matt Mullenweg, which maintains WordPress.com, confirmed that the service experienced a denial-of-service attack with up to 6 gigabits of incoming traffic which lead to blogs being inaccessible for several minutes on Tuesday.
Companies that have blogs hosted by WordPress.com experienced outages over 15 mintues in some cases. With this type of outage users were left without the ability to log into their blogs and make any changes or post comments. This is a big handicap in our Blogging world and goes without saying that many bloggers were very unhappy about the situation.
Usually the perpetrator of a DoS attack targets high-profile, high-traffic sites. In the case of the WordPress.com hosted blogs the rang of site traffic varies on a large scale. Although DoS are somewhat common, they have tapered off in the recent years because of the advancement of technology in preventing these types of attacks.
A spokesman for security research and software company McAfee, Joris Evers, said that it's possible that the attack was initiated by someone "who was upset about something that was written on a WordPress blog, and they decided to take action against that".
Tip for Webmasters and Bloggers: With this type of scenario it only proves that many web services and hosting services are vulnerable to attacks. Webmasters and bloggers are recommended to keep current backups of their sites and keep their blogging software up-to-date to assist in recovering from any type of attacks.