Yesterday, our colleagues at AgencySpy floated some ideas as to why Gawker Media's blogs were experiencing slowness and technical difficulties over the last few days. One theory: a DDos attack:

"A Distributed Denial of Service attack is, simply put, like two or 10 people hitting refresh on Gawker millions of times a minute. Obviously, this is not a hack for the faint hearted (or unskilled). Sometimes it's one person, others it's multiple. Sometimes the damage is temporary, others it is permanent."

Today it looks like that was in fact what was bringing sites like Jezebel, Gizmodo and flagship Gawker down. However, Gawker Media said in a memo to employees that the attack targeted Consumerist.com, a site that Gawker sold late last year to Consumer Reports, although it apparently still hosts the site.

$5 to the person who can find the Consumerist story that might motivate such an attack on the site. Or maybe those in the Scientology community, upset with a recent Gawker piece, are just really smart and sneaky.

(Photo via Flickr)