Several SourceForge, Inc sites, including the popular technology news site Slashdot have been offline for several hours today.

All of Netcraft’s globally distributed performance monitors have recorded a solid period of downtime at a number of sites hosted in the VA Software netblock. VA Software is the former name of SourceForge, Inc, which hosts all of the affected sites, including Slashdot, the source code repository SourceForge.net, software release site Freshmeat and merchandise supplier ThinkGeek.

Static uptime graph for www.slashdot.org

Netcraft’s live monitoring of www.slashdot.org can be seen here, reflecting a contiguous outage of approximately 5 hours.