The Federal Communications Commission says its comment system was victim to cyberattacks Sunday night around midnight after the host of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight,” John Oliver, railed against a push to roll back Obama-era “net neutrality” regulations.
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced a proposed rulemaking in April, to be voted on later this month, which would “reverse the mistake” of the FCC net neutrality ruling in 2015 that classified Internet service providers like AT&T and Comcast as Title II public utilities. Under the Title II classification, ISPs are subject to FCC control, allowing more stringent oversight over companies that might block or inhibit access to certain types of web services by creating pay-to-play fast lanes for certain content.
Oliver dedicated his latest episode, which began at 11 p.m. ET, to rallying people to go to the FCC website and express their disapproval of Pai’s plan. He even said the show bought an easy-to-remember URL — GoFCCYourself.com — that would lead people directly to the right page to leave a comment.
Oliver’s monologue was particularly harsh on Pai, whom he called “deeply disingenuous.” He condemned Pai’s assertion that there is no evidence to support hypothetical concerns that ISPs could interfere with websites and applications, saying “There are multiple examples of ISP fuckery over the years.”
While Oliver didn’t encourage an attack against the FCC, within an hour the agency was experiencing technical issues due to “multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks.”
“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,” said FCC chief information officer David Bray in a statement Monday. “These actors were not attempting to file comments themselves; rather they made it difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file with the FCC.”
Bray said the comment system remained “up and running” throughout, though the DDoS attacks prevented people from successfully submitting comments. “We have worked with our commercial partners to address this situation and will continue to monitor developments going forward,” he concluded.
It isn’t clear whether the attack was actually in response to Oliver’s show. The FCC did not comment on Oliver’s remarks, Reuters reported. The news outlet also pointed out AT&T, which opposes the Title II classification, last year agreed to buy Time Warner Inc., which owns “Last Week Tonight.”
A senior FCC official told reporters last month that the agency was gearing up for what some are expecting to be a record public-comment period, but also warned that its system may go down if hit by “malicious attacks” or a massive number of comments.
When the FCC held its open comment period in 2014 on net neutrality, nearly 4 million members of the public filed comments, a record according to the Obama administration. Some of the credit went to Oliver, who during the first season of his HBO show, dedicated an episode rallying support for comments supporting net neutrality. The commenting system crashed by the following day due to what the agency said was “heavy traffic.”
The senior FCC official said last month that the comment system has been upgraded since 2014 and 2015, but stressed that it still has “limits.”
“In particular the FCC has seen malicious traffic that tends to target our system at various times,” the FCC official said. “And so, we cannot guarantee that the system will stay up if such malicious attacks occur or if there’s just an overwhelming amount of people that want to file at the same time.”
