Submission + - API Outage Temporarily Takes Down Anti-Spam Filter Akismet (akismet.com)
Dangerous_Minds writes: When it comes to fighting spam on WordPress sites, many users turn to the Akismet comment spam filter plugin. However, recently, many users who use the plug-in are getting notices that there was an API issue that has prevented the plug-in from filtering spam comments. In spite of everything telling users Akismet is working properly, spam comments are not being filtered. What is going on? Akismet is reporting that they are having outages back on the 25th on their end for some users, "There was a sudden surge in spam traffic, on top of spam volumes that were already unusually high. One of our data centers began dropping some API calls, and responding slowly to others. Our systems team routed all traffic to another data center, and after a few minutes the load was stabilised." Today, Akismet is saying, "There was an API outage on November 28th. A switch failure led to cascading problems that took approximately 40 minutes to stabilize."