Iran’s petitioning platform, Daadkhast, was down for 30 to 90 minutes, sometime between 16:45 and 18:15 CET on Tuesday, November 19, 2019. Zamaneh Media continues to work with partners to find out and attribute the underlying cause.
During the outage, the Daadkhast website remained available and received visitors from around the world. However, visitors could not create new petitions or sign existing ones. In addition, the Daadkhast website mistakenly showed no signatures for all of its petitions.
The Daadkhast team is committed to user privacy and takes online safety and security seriously. There is no indication that user data was compromised at any time during the outage.
Zamaneh Media was made aware of the outage at 17:58 CET, on November 19, 2019, and immediately notified its technical service providers. They were able to bring the service back up and fully operational by 18:31 CET. Later investigation of the service logs indicated a large spike in traffic starting at 16:45 CET. Intermittent spikes in traffic continue. However, the effects of these have been mitigated by our technical service providers.
RadioZamaneh.com, which is co-hosted with Daakhast on the same hosting platform, suffered a similar outage of its content management system but not of the website front-end, which remained available throughout. At the time of the outage and throughout Tuesday, the petition written by Dr. Shirin Ebadi calling on António Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, drew a lot of visitors and signatories to the site. The petition, which has received more than 3,000 signatures, asks the United Nations to urge Iranian authorities to immediately stop the internet shutdown and their brutal crackdown of the fuel protest. The shutdown and crackdown of the protest are ongoing.
At the moment, the cause of the traffic spikes and the attribution of the events are unknown. However, Zamaneh Media continues to work with its technical service providers to find out the underlying cause. This article will be updated as more information becomes available.
