As I write this I’m able to access dbnomics resources OK, but over the last couple of days access has been intermittent, with no response from both the website and the forum much of the time. The issue seems to have been specific to dbnomics since other web resources loaded fine (plus I’m hearing the same from colleagues in Germany and Italy, while I’m in the US). I’m wondering if this is a known problem.
Thank you for reporting this.
Indeed last week DBnomics had availability issues. We are aware of that.
The reason is because an unknown user made a huge number of requests, trying to download huge datasets via the API, causing other users to experience timeouts. This is a kind of denial of service, although I would not qualify it an “attack”.
We are working on a robust solution to avoid this in the future.
Thanks again and sorry for the inconvenience.
Thanks for the info. Good luck with solving the excessive requests problem!