Soundcloud Suffers Two Days Of Attacks, Outages

(UPDATED) Hugely popular "sound platform" Soundcloud has fallen victim to a DDoS attack and service outage that began on Monday. "Very sorry for the current downtime," the company told users before Noon PDT.  By 8 PM some parts of the site were back, but others, including its much used API, were still unavailable. As problems continued the next day, the company shared what went wrong: "We can confirm that the ongoing service outage that started at 8:40pm last night CET has been a distributed denial-of-service attack."

"Its an attack using elevated amount(s) of traffic," Soundcloud tweeted late on Wednesday."  This common method of distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) involves "saturating the target machine with external communications requests, so that it can't handle legitimate traffic," according to Wikipedia. "Such attacks usually lead to a server overload."

Slowly, things are now starting to improve. "Our attempts at mitigating was successful and we’re now stabilizing,: Soundcloud shared late yesterday. "We might experience some intermittent hiccups, transcoding delays and unavailable players but it looks like we’re on track on getting back to full capacity."

In a sign o the affection that Soundcloud users feel for the platform, most tweets and comments throughout the attack have been curious and supportive rather than angry. "It feels great to feel the support of such a great community," Soundcloud responded late last night.

UPDATE: An audio message from Soundcloud co-founder Alex.