While I work at Six Apart, I, personally, don't know the reasons for this right now, as I am not in that particular chain of command. Thank Jebus.

Since approximately 4:00 pm Pacific Daylight Time, Six Apart has been the victim of a sophisticated distributed denial of service attack. This has affected all of Six Apart's sites, causing intermittent and limited availability for TypePad, LiveJournal, TypeKey, sixapart.com, movabletype.org and movabletype.com. Our network operations staff is working around the clock with our Internet access providers to resolve the issue. We appreciate your patience and support, and will provide updates as we have them.

- Six Apart - Everything TypePad - TypePad Update

I'm not sure how I feel about all the blogging about 'attacks' - Of course the nomenclature is accurate, that seems to be exactly what happened, it just smacks of Fox News Terrorism Reports a little too much for my liking. It's the internet people, nobody died or anything.

It created an interesting situation at around 4pm though. Its essentially the web service company equivilent of the wheels spontainiously falling off the tourbus.

:: Throws hands up to the sky ::

Why did that happen? How can we fix it? How do we get it to the mechanic? Where is the mechanic anyway? I'm late for a meeting! Call my secretary! Why does this have to happen right before I'm about to go home? (and from the kids in the back) Why doesnt the radio work?

Thankfully there were several great teams working on it immediately and answering all those questions and trying to get the wheels back on. It is clearly a help-or-get-out-of-the-way kind of situation, and for those of us who couldnt do much to help, it left us scratching our heads wondering what to do without the all knowing internet. We might have to actually talk to eachother.

Once everything was back up (spotty but online as of 11ish) I could finish what I had to stop working on at four this afternoon (this is why this post is dated at 1:30 in the morning). I know I'm not the only one working on things right now, at least I get to go to bed soon. But with all the crankypants bloggers out there writing about downtime and reliability, I just wanted to say thank you to my fellow six aparters. Good job, and try and catch a nap soon okay?