The show echoed John Oliver's intervention in 2014, when he did a brutal takedown of then-Chairman Tom Wheeler's early stab at an Open Internet order. | Getty John Oliver again fires up net neutrality debate

The Republican-led Federal Communications Commission has been marching along with its effort to roll back the agency's Obama-era net neutrality rules.

Then comedian John Oliver stepped in. Again.


The HBO host took aim at FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's proposal to gut the rules — and ridiculed Pai and his oversize coffee mug — in a fiery Sunday night segment that ended with another call to arms for viewers to make their voices heard at the agency. The show echoed Oliver's intervention in 2014, when he did a brutal takedown of then-Chairman Tom Wheeler's early stab at an Open Internet order.

"Every internet group needs to come together like you successfully did three years ago. Every subculture must join as one: gamers, YouTube celebrities, Instagram models," Oliver said, calling on "trolls" from 4chan and Reddit to join the fight.

Following the Oliver show, which first aired at 11 p.m. Sunday, the FCC's comment site sputtered and went down at times. But FCC Chief Information Officer David Bray had a different explanation for the disruption, saying the the agency was the victim of distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attacks, in which hackers flood a target with fake traffic to force it offline.

"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," Bray said in a statement. "These actors were not attempting to file comments themselves; rather they made it difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file with the FCC."

FCC spokesman Mark Wigfield said he doesn't know the motive for the alleged attack and declined to provide the specific number of comments the agency received following Oliver's segment. According to the FCC's site, more than 200,000 comments have been filed since Pai made his draft proposal public on April 27, with more than 100,000 comments coming in between Sunday and Monday.

Wigfield said there were similar DDoS attacks in 2014 right after the Oliver episode aired in June of that year, though at the time the Democratic-led agency did not report a cyberattack.

Some activists appeared skeptical of the DDoS explanation. "Very ~*interesting*~ that the @FCC is claiming a DDos attack took down its site and not just concerned Americans fighting for #netneutrality," the activist group Color of Change tweeted Monday. "We know better. And we won't be ignored or intimidated."

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The debate that led to the 2015 Open Internet rules generated roughly 4 million online comments. Since then, there have been upgrades to the FCC's systems, but senior agency officials have warned that there could still be problems, saying there's no guarantee the system will stay up if an overwhelming number of people try to file at the same time. Officials have offered alternative filing guidance for those who want to submit group comments.

Pai's proposal, set for a vote at the May 18 meeting, would weaken the FCC's power over internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon by repealing the regulatory underpinnings of the 2015 Open Internet order. The item also seeks comments on whether the agency should modify or eliminate the net neutrality rules of no blocking, no throttling and no pay-for-play internet fast lanes.

Activists groups have offered their own platform for people to submit comments in case the FCC's website goes down. Demand Progress, Fight for the Future and Free Press have relaunched BattleForTheNet.com.

"We are thrilled that Oliver spurred so much pro-net neutrality activism last night," the groups said in a statement.