Scottish news site admits coding mishap caused outage

Alternative news site Newsnet Scotland has admitted that a coding cock-up rather than a denial of service attack by pro-Unionism political opponents, was behind the outage of its site earlier this week.

Initially the outage looked like the result of a flood of traffic that had knocked the site offline. In reality, changes to a module created a feedback loop that created a "high volume of cyclic activity in the server".

Newsnet Scotland's hosting provider pulled the plug on the site while the mess was sorted out, essentially to isolate the problem, a decision the news site supports.

The site put out a statement apologising for the outage - which ran from around midday on Monday until Tuesday morning - and promising an improvement in procedures that will hopefully prevent future mishaps along the same lines.

The contrite tone of the statement, by Alex Porter, chief exec of Newsnet Scotland, contrasts sharply with the firebrand rhetoric of the site's initial communiques, when the site still thought it was under active attack in the run-up to elections due to take place on 5 May.

"Scottish media freedom of speech online now appears to be threatened by those who would prefer the unchallenged voice of Unionism to prevail," it said at the time, likening the supposed attack to ones by the Chinese government against websites supporting Tibetan independence. ®