Back when reports came out that the FCC didn't have written documentation of the event, the commission said that was completely untrue and that it has "voluminous documentation of this attack in the form of logs collected by [its] commercial cloud partners." It said the agency didn't share details about the attack, because doing so would undermine its security. The commission would have to share those details with the Senators, though, even if they're confidential. Schatz and Wyden also want to know whether the FCC is collaborating with the Government Accountability Office to look into its website's vulnerability to attacks. After all, if it's been infiltrated twice, something has to be done to tighten its security.

Here's a short version of what compelled the Senators to pen the letter, if you haven't been keeping tabs on the FCC's activities: the agency's website crashed in 2017, which prevented people from posting comments on chairman Ajit Pai's proposal to eliminate net neutrality rules. (His plan ultimately succeeded, and Obama-era net neutrality protections ended yesterday -- but that's another story.) After the 2017 outage happened, former FCC IT Chief David Bray told the media that it was caused by DDoS, and that there was a similar "attack after the 2014 [John Oliver] clip" about net neutrality.

Bray also said that former Chairman Tom Wheeler chose to keep the earlier event a secret "out of concern of copycats," but the ex-FCC chief recently denied that was the case. He said there was no cover-up, because there was nothing to cover. "We didn't want to say it [was a DDoS in 2014] because Bray had no hard proof that it was a DDoS attack. Just like the second time [in 2017]," former Wheeler adviser Gigi Sohn told Ars Technica. Bray eventually admitted that the concern about copycats was his own.

When Wheeler was asked during his interview with C-Span why the FCC would claim that there was a DDoS attack in 2014 when there wasn't one, he said: "I am the last person in the world to interpret the decision making of the Trump FCC." We might finally hear more about the FCC's motivations once it replies to the Senators: Schatz and Wyden are asking for a written explanation by June 27th.

Check out the letter in full below: