FCC accused of “spreading lies” about DDoS hitting comment system

Enlarge / John Oliver takes on FCC Chairman Ajit Pai in a May 2017 net neutrality segment. (credit: HBO Last Week Tonight)

Federal Communications Commission officials are facing more accusations that they lied about the cause of a May 2017 comment website outage that temporarily prevented people from submitting comments on FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's plan to eliminate net neutrality rules.

The FCC maintains that its system was hit by multiple distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, but it hasn't provided evidence publicly to support that claim. The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) is investigating the FCC's DDoS claims at the urging of Democratic lawmakers.

The controversy flared up again this week in a Gizmodo story titled "FCC Emails Show Agency Spread Lies to Bolster Dubious DDoS Attack Claims."

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