Late Sunday night, John Oliver's Last Week Tonight aired a segment on Net Neutrality under the new Trump administration. Led by chairman Ajit Pai, the FCC has had a widely publicized opposition to current Obama-Era net neutrality legislation. Oliver's scathing report on large ISPs and the current FCC's policies that favor them over the health of the internet concluded with a call to action for viewers to voice their displeasure.
Oliver directed viewers to the URL gofccyourself.com that he owns and is directed at the FCC's comment page. With millions watching live and later on Youtube combined, this quickly overwhelmed the FCC's website. It went down shortly after the segment aired and was slow to load for most of the day as consumers continued expressing their comments in the hopes of keeping the internet free.
The FCC didn't like all of this bad publicity apparently. In a statement, FCC chief information officer David Bray said that "beginning on Sunday night at midnight, our analysis reveals that the FCC was subject to multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDos)." Rather than calling it an unintentional denial-of-service, Bray believes that "these were deliberate attempts by external actors to bombard the FCC's comment system with a high amount of traffic to our commercial cloud host."
Although they haven't provided any evidence yet, Bray and the FCC believe that "these actors were not attempting to file comments themselves; rather they made it difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file with the FCC." The site also went down in 2014 when Oliver also aired an episode on net neutrality. In that case, the outage was caused by an unintentional DDoS from viewers making comments in a similar way.