We Can't Have Nice Things Any More

Okay, so this happened:

For the last week or so, I kept running into an error message when I tried to upload my cartoons to the AAEC site in the evening. I found that I had to upload to editorialcartoonists.com in the morning; otherwise, just trying to visit the site at all sometimes got me this page:

The other day, the AAEC site greeted me with one of those "We're verifying your web browser and this should only take five seconds" pages... but that's as far as I ever got. I was browsing on my iPod, and there are other sites and apps that don't like its web browser, so I didn't think much of it.

The official explanation was in the e-mails the other day:

Hey all,

As you may have noticed, we've been having some issues with the AAEC website.

Last week we were targeted by a DDoS attack (as were, it turns out, so many US companies over the long Labor Day weekend). Then today, as our new web developers were in the process of upgrading and installing a new firewall, we got hit again.

They are still in the process of determining if this second outage was an attack, or if one of y'all's cartoons went viral, but even with the new software in place, our site was overwhelmed by requests.

The new developers will continue to try and fix this, but if you run into difficulties again (either pages not loading, or 522 errors), don't hesitate to let me know. Thanks! —JP

In the meantime, my legion-and-a-half of fans will have to find my cartoons on this humble website, although they're also on line at qsaltlake.com and pridesource.com.

And be sure to tune in tomorrow for the thrilling conclusion of the assassination of William F. McKinley.