Associated Press Site Recovers from Possible Denial-of-Service Attack; Anonymous Sudan Claims Responsibility

Site Outage Left Individual Story Links Unreachable, Claims of Responsibility Remain Unverified by AP

The Associated Press news website experienced an outage that started on Tuesday afternoon and was resolved by Wednesday morning. The symptoms were consistent with a denial-of-service (DoS) attack, where a site is flooded with data to knock it offline.
The outage impacted individual story links on the website with various issues including blank pages and error messages. AP's delivery systems to customers and mobile apps, however, were not affected.
Anonymous Sudan, a hacktivist group, claimed responsibility for the attack on its Telegram channel, stating that they would be attacking Western news outlets. The group also posted screenshots of the supposedly affected AP as well as other news sites.
Nicole Meir, a media relations manager at AP, stated that the company had experienced periodic surges in traffic but was still investigating the cause. Engineers noticed that even when they managed surging traffic from one source, it would reappear from another.
Cybersecurity firm Recorded Future noted the 'propaganda mechanism' used by such hacktivist groups is simple: conducting a temporary attack, taking screenshot as 'proof' of an outage which usually lasts a short period and affects a small number of users, and then claiming it a massive success. AP has not been able to confirm if Anonymous Sudan is truly responsible for the attack.