The LinuxWorld and Sys-Con sites experienced downtime in mid-May after a controversy involving articles by a Sys-Con freelancer led several senior LinuxWorld editors to resign. Sys-Con publisher Fuat Kircaali said his company’s sites had been hit with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. “Our Web sites remained under constant attack for three days,” Kircaali told Free Software magazine. “We lost thousands of dollars in revenues during the past three days.” Some observers speculated the claimed DDoS was actually waves of visitors from Slashdot, which posted several items about the editorial resignations, whileo others believe a real DDoS attack occurred.