On September 3 and 4, many members of the domain community encountered serious problems when trying to visit the official ICANN website. The website either loaded extremely slowly and incompletely, or did not respond to requests at all. Almost a week later, the cause of this failure became known. On its official website (which has returned to normal operation in full), ICANN published the following short message: " ICANN identified a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) event that occurred on www.icann.org on 3 Sept. 2024. The situation was mitigated and service to ICANN’s website was restored on 4 Sept. 2024."
The message did not indicate the duration, the power of the attack, or the possible motives of its organizers. Perhaps this information will appear later, as the incident is investigated more thoroughly. In the meantime, Domain Incite, reporting this news, notes that the DDoS attack on September 3-4 was the first cybersecurity incident serious enough for ICANN to consider it necessary to report the incident on its official website for the first time in two years.
