Apologies to anybody who struggled to access this website yesterday.Â
We are aware the site was slow or even inaccessible for a few hours.
It turns out, according to our tech team, that we experienced an unusual spike in traffic.
Not the sort of spike we get when I rant about Rolex shortages, but something else entirely: a denial of service attack by Russian bots.
Ridiculous as it may seem, it appears Watchpro was caught up in the information war over the invasion of Ukraine, and Kremlin spooks did not like our coverage of watch brands boycotting Russia.
If we go dark again in the coming days, you will know why.
Nice to know the russians are worried about watch bands. Perhaps it is time for them to set a time table to withdraw from Ukraine. We had an influx of suspected russian spammers requesting access to our watch forums, Bestdamnwatchforum and watchlords. I think I banned over 200 of them in the last 5 weeks. We use cloudflare to protect the forums and it seems to work well. I do enjoy the blog, keep up the good work.
Thanks for the tip, and keep up the vigil!