Blogging site LiveJournal is still being hammered by a distributed denial of service attack which started 10 days ago.

On November 28, the LiveJournal Status website announced in both English and Russian that the site was under a DDoS attack.

The attack appears to have continued over the past 10 days, causing some significant outages and slowdowns. Nonetheless, LiveJournal did manage to stay online throughout most of this period, although the company had to disable support for third party services such as Facebook, Twitter and Google yesterday.

LiveJournal has been owned by Russian media company SUP since 2007, and there has been much speculation that this latest attack could be related to recent elections in Russia. LiveJournal was subjected to a series of similar attacks in March and April this year, which LiveJournal attempted to counter by upgrading their servers.

At 13:15 UTC today, LiveJournal again confirmed that the site was up, but still under a DDoS attack.

Netcraft measures and makes available the response times of around forty leading hosting providers' sites. The performance measurements are made at fifteen minute intervals from separate points around the internet, and averages are calculated over the immediately preceding 24 hour period.

From a customer's point of view, the percentage of failed requests is more pertinent than outages on hosting companies' own sites, as this gives a pointer to reliability of routing, and this is why we choose to rank our table by fewest failed requests, rather than shortest periods of outage. In the event the number of failed requests are equal then sites are ranked by average connection times.

Information on the measurement process and current measurements is available.

A sustained distributed denial of service attack against 4chan has kept the site's message boards mostly offline since the weekend:

4chan's status page, which is hosted on Google's Blogger platform, announced on Sunday 13 November that the site was down due to a large DDoS attack. 4chan today revealed that the ongoing DDoS attack consists of a UDP packet flood on port 80. Such attacks typically aim to disrupt normal operation of a website, either by saturating all available bandwidth, or by exhausting the processing capacity of a web server, thus denying service to legitimate users.

The attack also affected 4chan's main page at www.4chan.org, which has been intermittently unavailable during the same period:

Many popular internet memes are believed to have originated from 4chan's message boards, including Lolcats and the practice of rickrolling. The boards were also used to recruit volunteers when the group Anonymous carried out a series of DDoS attacks against MasterCard, Visa and PayPal last year. When 4chan itself subsequently suffered a similar attack at the start of this year, 4chan made light of the fact that it had joined "the ranks of MasterCard, Visa, PayPal et al.–an exclusive club!".

Rackspace had the most reliable hosting company site in October, responding to each and every one of Netcraft's requests throughout the month. Rackspace also had the most reliable site in April, despite failing to respond to two requests that month.

Rackspace provides managed and cloud hosting from nine datacentres in the US, UK and Hong Kong. The company is well known for the "Fanatical Support" it offers to its customers, including those who have chosen to move to other hosting companies. Rackspace serves its own website from an F5 BIG-IP device.

Kattare Internet Services also responded to all requests, but had a slower average connection time than Rackspace. Kattare's primary focus is on Java hosting – using Tomcat with private Java virtual machines – but also hosts PHP, Ruby, Perl and Python applications on shared hosting, managed servers and collocated machines in Corvallis, Oregon.

Seven of October's top ten hosting company websites used Linux, while the other three used FreeBSD, Windows Server 2008 and F5 BIG-IP.

Netcraft measures and makes available the response times of around forty leading hosting providers' sites. The performance measurements are made at fifteen minute intervals from separate points around the internet, and averages are calculated over the immediately preceding 24 hour period.

From a customer's point of view, the percentage of failed requests is more pertinent than outages on hosting companies' own sites, as this gives a pointer to reliability of routing, and this is why we choose to rank our table by fewest failed requests, rather than shortest periods of outage. In the event the number of failed requests are equal then sites are ranked by average connection times.

Information on the measurement process and current measurements is available.

Office product company Staples.co.uk has been knocked offline by the popularity of its own discount voucher codes. The UK website became flooded with traffic after a £20-off voucher code appeared on several popular bargain-hunting sites, including HotUKDeals and the MoneySavingExpert.com forums.

The £20-off voucher code – which did not require a minimum spend – allowed customers to claim up to £20 worth of items for free, leaving only the delivery charge to pay. Although the code could only be used once per customer, several users successfully bypassed that restriction by placing several orders from multiple accounts. Larger discounts and free delivery were available on more expensive items by adding one of several other voucher codes on top of the existing £20 reduction:

A large volume of HTTP requests originating from many different locations can often have the same effect as a deliberately planned distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, but it is clear that no such attack took place; the site was simply swamped with legitimate requests from its own customers, who were keen to snap up some bargains. It is not yet clear whether orders placed using these vouchers will be honoured – order confirmations have been emailed to customers, but such orders remain subject to approval.

Several other technology retail websites, including Staples, were affected by similarly huge demand in August, when the price of the 16GB HP TouchPad tablet was slashed to only £89. That was also viewed by many as an unmissable opportunity, with a single HotUKDeals forum post alone attracting more than 60,000 comments while its members discussed where they could buy one. The demand continued long after they were sold out, with some TouchPads being resold on eBay for more than twice the original cost.

The Staples UK website became responsive once more around lunchtime today, following the deactivation of the original £20-off voucher code: