The web site for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) was offline for more than five hours yesterday. The downtime for riaa.com comes on the heels of extended performance problems late last week, marked by sporadic outages and slow response times, as visible on this performance chart:

A dynamically updating graph of the site performance of riaa.com is available here.

Last year the RIAA site experienced monthly outages coinciding with scheduled denial-of-service attacks by computers compromised by the MyDoom.F virus. The RIAA site has a history of outages related to DDoS attacks (including extended downtime in July 2002 and January 2003) and has frequently been defaced.