Like most companies operating large public websites, Psych Central is the target of these kinds of attacks on a regular basis. This attack came from China, which accounted for more traffic than any other country yesterday (usually our China-based traffic is minuscule).

We are setup to deal with such attacks, but they do impact the services we offer sometimes. This is the world we live in, unfortunately, and people who run these attacks (which involve a command-and-control structure of directing thousands of individual computers to try and access our site all at once, in order to deny access to legitimate users) don't really care about laws or the potential harm they cause.

There's nothing to worry about on your end -- these attacks are directed at one of our servers only and only are meant to deny service to you. But we're equipped to handle them, and they are part and parcel of running sites like this.