Stack Overflow, the coding-focused Q&A site that’s proven to be an essential tool for professional and amateur programmers alike, had an approximately hour-long outage Sunday morning that affected a number of users.
According to Stack Overflow’s parent company Stack Exchange, the cause was a DDoS attack against its network provider. The issue has been “partially mitigated” and the site is back up and running now, Stack Exchange says.
Reports of Stack Overflow’s outage started to hit Twitter and Hacker News at around 11am Pacific Time Sunday, and continued for about an hour. The panicked (and often humorous) notes of programmers who were unable to access the site during their planned Sunday coding sessions show just how valuable the service is for so many people:
https://twitter.com/1337luft/status/435129676084686848
Well, stackoverflow is down. Might as well pack it in and take the day off.
— Jeff Pickett (@pickett) February 16, 2014
https://twitter.com/adamjstevenson/status/435133630541594624
stackoverflow is down. my career is on hold.
— rodley (@rodley) February 16, 2014
Came to work on a Sunday and Stack Overflow is down EVERYBODY PANIC
— Vineet Shah (@vineetshah) February 16, 2014
Now that the site is back up and running, though, anyone who was secretly relieved at the prospect of getting a “snow day” away from coding will probably have to find another excuse.
https://twitter.com/Undo_SE/status/435141703364657152
We’ve reached out to Stack Exchange for more details on the DDoS attack and the resulting outage and will update with any information we receive.
