Vid Problems faced by consumers hoping to submit comments to the Federal Communications Commission over the weekend were caused by a denial of service attack, the US government agency admits.

In a statement, FCC chief information officer Dr David Bray blamed issues with the FCC’s Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS) on sustained denial of service attacks from unnamed and perhaps as-yet unidentified griefers.

"Beginning on Sunday night at midnight, our analysis reveals that the FCC was subject to multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDos)," Dr. Bray said. "These were deliberate attempts by external actors to bombard the FCC’s comment system with a high amount of traffic to our commercial cloud host."

He added: "These actors were not attempting to file comments themselves; rather they made it difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file with the FCC. While the comment system remained up and running the entire time, these DDoS events tied up the servers and prevented them from responding to people attempting to submit comments."

Dr Bray added that the FCC was working with its commercial partners to get on top of the situation.

Of course, none of this has to do with telly comedian John Oliver over the weekend calling on Americans to bombard the regulator with their views on net neutrality... DDoS? Yeah, right. ®

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