The Facebook page of the leading Ukrainian business website, liga.net, suffered a five-hour outage after a massive bot attack on 6 December.
The social network blocked all traffic to the page after receiving thousands of complaints and marked all links to liga.net articles as spam. Facebook’s response to the attack was apparently automatic and prevented thousands of posts to liga.net’s page and tens of thousands of reposts by Facebook users. After investigating the incident, the social media site again allowed traffic to the page.
According to the most recent ratings by the Institute of Mass Information, liga.net is the most journalistically professional Ukrainian news site. Liga.net has a monthly audience of 3.2 million unique users and its Facebook page has more than 225,000 followers.