THE LATEST
Statcounter responded to our inquiry for more information about what was happening. Once again, the company confirmed that it was being targeted by a denial of service attack and said they were working on a workaround for the issue. They hoped that the site would be “back to normal soon” and assured us that the stats themselves “should be working fine” because those particular servers weren’t affected by the attack.
Statcounter adds DDoS protection
After receiving the response, another visit to Statcounter’s site suggests that the workaround they mentioned may be up and running. The company has now put in place DDoS protection technology from CloudFlare. Users who visit the site will have their browser checked automatically, but don’t worry. It’s supposed to do that.
Visitors to Statcounter will be greeted by this image, which allows CloudFlare to check traffic and protect against more service disruptions because of the denial of service attacks which hackers have been launching against it for hours.
PREVIOUSLY
Statcounter, a popular service used to monitor web traffic on website, appears to be having a lot of problems, if Twitter reports are anything to go by. The micro-blogging site is lighting up with reports that Statcounter has been having issues all morning, and the service does seem to be going in and out, working sometimes but not at other times. The website confirmed that it has been targeted by a denial of service or DDoS attack, which basically involves hackers flooding a site with traffic to prevent it from working.
According to the site Is It Down Right Now, ten users reported problems with it over the last few hours. However, the site was able to ping Statcounter without any problems. Statcounter said on its Twitter feed just few minutes ago that it is back online although the DDoS attack continues. Here’s their full tweet:
Site back on-line again. The attack is still on-going though. So we’re continuing to monitor.
— statcounter (@statcounter) February 27, 2014