Be Prepared for Independent News Blackout if All Hell Breaks Loose on Friday, Inauguration Day

by Susan Duclos, All News Pipeline:

By now many know that over the last few weeks the Drudge Report suffered massive DDoS attacks, the first knocking the popular news aggregation site offline for about an hour-and-a-half, the second time it was unavailable periodically during about an hour time frame. What many did not catch because it only lasted for minutes, was on January 15, 2017, we started seeing chatter about the Drudge Report showing a cached version of it’s page with news from 10 days previously, from January 5, 2017.

Stefan Stanford grabbed a screen shot, where the date the screen shot was taken is shown in the lower right corner in the image below: (The image was too large to fit on page in its original size, so click image (or here) to enlarge so you can see the time stamp in the lower right corner of when the image was taken. It will open in a new tab or window.)

A look through Drudge’s archived pages shows that was what his paged looked like on January 5, 2017. Archives here, date and time of that original page here, as seen in the URL itself when you click the link.

Just one day later, on January 16, 2017, we reloaded Steve Quayle’s site to see if he had posted anything new, and the date listed on his site, as well as the articles he linked to were from 1/12/16, showing a page that was four days old rather than his current page. As with the Drudge Report incident, the cached version of the site only last for minutes, then the updated live version was available again.

In the screen shot below, I opened the image I took, along with the properties, to show that the file was created on 1/16/2017, yet his page date on top is 1/12/17.

Many services offer a way to keep a site online, even if the original server goes offline, such as “Always Online,” from Cloudfare, which “is a feature that caches a static version of your pages in case your server goes offline,” according to their website. Or the Google Cached Page service where “Google crawls the web and takes snapshots of each page as a backup just in case the current page is not available,” according to Cached View.

As seen from the descriptions, the cached version of the pages are shown when a server goes offline or the current page is not available. In both cases, the sites in question, Quayle’s and Drudge’s, were only unavailable for minutes before the current live versions were available again, so short a time that none of us would have noticed had we not happened to click the links in that very short time frame.

Both Drudge’s and Quayle’s websites have extraordinary capacity for traffic, so there is no reason their sites should have been showing cached versions or have gone offline even for a minute.

Almost like some entity was testing the ability to knock, heavily trafficked Independent Media sites, offline, as was done with the massive DDoS attacks against Drudge just weeks ago, where Matt Drudge himself asked if the U.S. Government was behind it.

The timing of the Drudge DDoS attacks, then the latest strangeness of periodically not being able to access certain Independent Media sites, just to have them suddenly come back up again within minutes, then over the last two days, the examples shown above where for a very short time, two prominent sites were forced to show old cached versions before going live again, all happening leading up to Friday, the Day Trump is to be inaugurated, with attacks being planned, protesters organizing chaos in an attempt to prevent the inauguration, and weapons’ caches having been found close to the Inauguration location, was enough to cause concern.

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