There was no DDoS attack against the Federal Communications Commission comments system in 2014, former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said this week. Wheeler’s statement disputes claims made by the FCC under current Chairman Ajit Pai, who is under fire for unproven claims about DDoS attacks.
The controversy began in May 2017 after Pai unveiled an early version of his plan to eliminate net neutrality rules. The FCC system for accepting public comments on Pai’s plan failed just as many net neutrality supporters were trying to submit pro-net neutrality comments on the urging of comedian John Oliver.
The FCC claimed the May 2017 outage was caused by “multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS)” rather than by the volume of legitimate pro-net neutrality comments or by a simple failure of the system.
