Ajit Pai grilled by lawmakers on why FCC spread “myth” of DDoS attack

Enlarge / FCC Chairman Ajit Pai listens during a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee hearing in Washington, DC, on June 20, 2017. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

Democratic members of Congress want to know when Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai knew that the FCC's claims about being hit by a DDoS attack were false.

An FCC Inspector General (IG) investigation found that the FCC lied to members of Congress multiple times in letters that answered questions about DDoS attacks that never happened. Pai's FCC claimed for more than a year that a May 2017 outage in the public comments system was caused by multiple DDoS attacks. In reality, the FCC system crashed because it was unable to handle an influx of comments triggered by comedian John Oliver asking viewers of his program Last Week Tonight to oppose Pai's net neutrality repeal.

Today, four Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee sent a letter to Pai "demanding to know when he and his staff learned that the Commission had provided inaccurate information about why its comment system went down during the net neutrality repeal public comment period," the Democrats said in an announcement.

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