When comedian John Oliver recently amusingly explained net neutrality and called for the Internet's trolls to descend upon on the FCC to do what they do best, the FCC's website commenting system shut down shortly after. Most assumed that the website couldn't handle the load of normal, heavy commenters andtrolls Oliver brought to bear on the site.

However, according to a report over at Vice, the website actually suffered a denial of service attack, which crippled the technical underpinnings of the website's comment system:

quote:

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"We received a surge in the volume of visits to our electronic comment filing system last week," the FCC said. "A byproduct of the high volume was what is known is a 'dead record lock,' where connections in the database create record lock contention and eventually cause the system to freeze. This created difficulty for people trying to submit and search for filed comments."

The spike in dead record locks wasn’t from increased Web traffic or a fundamental technical problem with the FCC’s website, sources said. Rather, the site was hit by a sustained effort from unknown digital assailants who were trying to hobble the agency’s database, in an apparent attempt to make the FCC and its IT systems look bad.

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Oddly there seems to be some confusion at the FCC over whether this was a DOS attack or not. An FCC official tells Endgaget that Vice "misconstrued" their statement, but Vice is sticking by their story. Regardless, it's a good opportunity to remind folks that if you haven't submitted your comments on net neutrality to the FCC, you should do so here (proceeding 14-28).