Today, the popular version control code repository GitHub issued a statement to the media announcing that it has been fending off a massive attack on its system which managed to knock it servers off-line early Friday morning. The company said that around 10:40 UTC the site was struck with a massive DDoS attack from unknown sources.
Roughly an hour and a half later, the company had implemented processes that began to alleviate the load on their servers but things were not yet back to full functionality. "We've put mitigation in place that should deflect the attack, and services are recovering. We're continuing to monitor closely," GitHub said in a statement.
This is the second large DDoS attack against GitHub this year with the first happening back in March. Before that, the site experienced another massive attack in September 2012 and one before that during February 2012 that lasted for a whole week. It is unclear who keeps attacking the site or what motivates them to try and bring down the service.
At the moment, my GitHub repository appears to be accessible from the website, my desktop client, and through the command line. I suspect this means that GitHub may have things under control and service could be back to full functionality.