Global Botnet Attack Against WordPress
Apparently there was some sort of global attack against a variety of hosting providers last night (4/11/2013) targetting users of WordPress. The massive botnet attack targeted WordPress accounts and went directly after the login screen.
The performance degradation you experienced today was caused by a global attack against websites running the WordPress content managment system. The attack was directed at the login page for these sites. We have blocked external access to the login pages and that has corrected the performance issues.
One of our providers gave us that update this morning. We are still continuing to research the issue and see how Cloudflare was able to mitigate the attacks.
Update 4/12/13 9:00AM: Blog Entry by HostGator has a more comprehensive update of the attack. Essentially they are advising you makes sure you are using strong passwords for your wordpress sites (http://strongpasswordgenerator.com/). If you are experiencing any difficulty in getting to the login screen, you can also HTACCESS protect your wp-admin folder, which will block any automated attacks from directly reaching your wordpress admin install.
View HostGator Blog Entry Here
Update 4/12/2013 9:30AM: CloudFlare just rolled out rule to detect and stop the attack for all people hosted on their service (Free members as well).
Ongoing Twitter feed on the incident:
https://twitter.com/search?q=wordpress%20attack&src=typd