Nigeria’s largest online forum, Nairaland suffers major cyberattack

Nairaland, the largest online forum in Nigeria suffered a major cyberattack on Sunday, which led to the site being offline for over 72 hours.

A source told TechLoy that the site’s in-built ad network, which has helped the site generate a lot of revenues in the past year, may have been the target of the attack. Another source said Nairaland may have outgrown its servers and its database may have crashed as a result of the attack.

During the attack, visitors to the site were shown an Error 522 message from its hosting provider, CloudFlare indicating that the company was “unable to send the http request to the origin as no network connection to the origin server could be established.”

Although the site has been restored, it does appear that a lot data has been lost, which may take some time to recover back, if at all. “Nairaland is trying to recover from an attack that led to data loss. Please bear with us,” the web administrator of the site posted on Wednesday.

At the moment, the site has been able to recover data up until January 2014 and its home grown advertising network isn’t displaying any ads.

In May, Nairaland went offline for a few hours, but was later restored.