The NewsBiscuit tech team, analysts and spin doctors have spent the whole of Sunday evening up until medication and cocoa time attempting to resolve what appears to be yet another Dedicated Denial of Service (DDoS) upon NewsBiscuit.
Not everyone thinks this is the work of disenchanted hackers looking for easy prey. ‘It’s a conspiracy,’ said a conspiracy theory expert. ‘Everyone knows all conspiracy theories are started by the government,’ citing ‘Brexit’ and ‘Johnson apparently being a Prime Minister’ as examples, which seemed evidence enough. ‘You guys are always going after Raaaaab the Foreign Secretaaaaary, and Priti, please, Patel, so why wouldn’t they try to shut you down?’
Others think it is simpler than that. ‘It’s the Top Ten algorithm – it’s become sentient, gone rogue,’ said one contributor who didn’t want his name being released. ‘let’s just say, I’m always at number eleven,’ he grumbled.
Another suspect is Apostrophe Rebellion, AR. ‘It’s obviously the AR’s work – er, ARs’ work. Let’s just put it down to AR,’ said an expert.
Some believe the outage was caused by Biscuiteers themselves, panic downloading their whole writing history before the current site switches to the new site. ‘It was fine until Titus started,’ said one insider. ‘Fifteen terabytes of tickers that have never been used.’
‘It was never like this when JoF was in charge,’ accused one disgruntled Biscuiteer. ‘He’d go in with all guns blazing. Now they’ll probably just write a half arsed front page and carry on as if nothing happened.’
However, most experts believe it was DDOS activists, pubescent hackers without a life targeting middle aged men without a life. ‘We’re not so different,’ mused one Biscuiteer, ‘if they think they are so funny, why don’t they try writing for NewsBiscuit instead?’