Turnitin Experiencing Intermittent Outages in DDoS Attacks

Over the last three days, Turnitin has been the target of an extensive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack with the intent of taking down the service. A DDoS attack tries to overload the connection to our servers, rendering the Turnitin website unavailable to visitors. Our network team has been largely successful in combating the attacks, though the attempts have occasionally succeeded in causing intermittent service disruptions, slow service response times and other network issues. While these attacks have created intermittent connectivity issues, the attacks have NOT COMPROMISED server storage or data integrity.

Below, we’ve included some basic troubleshooting steps for those encountering issues accessing Turnitin.

Please note that the Penn State single sign on link remains functional and no outages have been reported to the Help Desk. However, if an issue is encountered, the the following steps can be taken.

Troubleshooting steps:

* Attempt to access the Turnitin service from a different internet connection (Ex. from home, a library, a cellular data network, etc.)
* Clear your web browser’s cookies and cache.
* Always log in through http://turnitin.psu.edu/ with your Penn State Access ID and password

The Turnitin network team will continue to work to defend against these attacks. For ongoing updates, please visit https://twitter.com/turnitinstatus.

More information: Turnitin Experiencing Intermittent Outages in DDoS Attacks