Why is Livejournal down so much?

[Pandaimon]

I've noticed a major culling over the last few years of similar journal sites, what's up with LJ?

[Imma]

Livejournal has after being bought up by the Russian SUP Media, catered almost exclusively to their Russian userbase and a growing Asian small-business related userbase, pushing any concerns about increasingly unpopular site-changes, aired by the old Western userbase in the background. To the point where these concerns have been ridiculed openly. This can only be seen as an active attempt to alienate the old userbase in order to create room for what is seen - by SUP Media - to be more profitable users (small business owners, advertising, media distribution.

The latest update on the current downtime experienced by many users across the world has been posted on Livejournal... Ironically so, since those it's directed at would in fact be unable to see this update. While there are no updates on the problem neither on LJ's official Facebook page norr their official Twitter feed.

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LiveJournal is currently up, but you may encounter some problems while attempting to use the service. Specifically, some pages may load slowly, the site may not respond when trying to login, and attempting to post entries or comments may result in intermittent errors. For people using certain Internet Service Providers (ISPs), LiveJournal is completely unavailable.

While LiveJournal has experienced some issues with our servers which we have posted about earlier, these issues have been resolved. The current problems are being caused by a sharp increase in malicious traffic which began on December 31. The first wave of that traffic was targeted at profile pages. As a temporary response to this, we disabled profile pages to maintain availability of the rest of the service.

We have already un-blocked profile pages but at this time, but some people using ISPs which have contributed to the malicious traffic are still being blocked by our mitigation system. We understand that there are legitimate users affected by this; in order to allow these people to access the site, we are taking steps to make the list of blocked addresses more precise so no legitimate users are affected.

In case your ISP is being blocked, there are several ways you can try to access the site:

- The Opera browser has a Turbo mode which works like a proxy server; LiveJournal may be available through this feature in Opera;
- If have access to an alternate ISP, try connecting through that ISP;
- You can try using any proxy servers available to you so your request is routed through networks that are not being blocked. If you do this, we strongly suggest you only use the servers you trust; passing your username and password through an untrusted network (e.g. in order to log in) can result in your account being compromised.

We apologize for the inconvenience these problems have caused.

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- So, to recap Livejournal's words "The usual bullshit, more bullshit, a bit of crap and then utter bullshit again." Why the hell would I risk using a crappy browser or an insecure proxy server, just to access LJ?

[Saifai]

My understanding is that many of the blog sites, LiveJournal especially, are targeted for political reasons. Russia in particular is experiencing some upheaval and dissenters get their access to their freedom of information shut down. That means commonly used blog sites like LJ get targeted, and everyone pays for it. I'm sure there's more to it, but that's usually what happens.