For much of last night and earlier today, most of Gawker Media’s properties were experiencing intermittent downtime, which is highly unusual for them.

All properties seem to be back up and running at their peak as I write this, so all is well again, but what caused the downtime in the first place? A property that Gawker sold last year was hacked.

The high profile consumer watchdog blog, Consumerist, purchased by the Consumers Union in 2008, was hacked and since it is apparently still hosted on the same servers as current Gawker sites, the hackage damage cascaded across other Gawker properties as well.

From Gawker:

Well here’s your last (Hopefully!) technical difficulties update: According to a memo sent out tonight by our IT team, the recent Gawker Media server problems were the result of a DDOS attack against Consumerist.

Quick thought – It may be time for Gawker to cut the umbilical cord with Consumerist, on the tech end of things at least.

Gawker dusts itself off after DDoS attack is a post from: The Inquisitr

“Server issues” is being bandied about as a cause- Consumerist, a blog that was sold by Gawker Media in 2008, indicated as such at around 11:30am EST and since that post the blog has been unusually quiet all day. Gawker also addressed the issue at 2:47pm with a brief post entitled “If You Can Read This Post, You’re One of the Lucky Few.”

It always seems pretty pointless to put up a post on a website to say that that site’s down. But to state the obvious: all Gawker Media sites are having really bad server problems today. It’s not just you.

In addition to Gizmodo, Gawker, i0, Jezebel, and Consumerist; Defamer, Deadspin, Jalopnik, Fleshbot, and Kotaku are also having connectivity issues. Whatever the cause may be, here’s to hoping it gets fixed soon. In the absence of many of my favorite blogs I’ve cleaned a few things and returned some long-waiting e-mails and bring back my celebrity gossip, damnit! It feels like one of those summer days where everyone else ran off to the beach and you’re the only one in the office. Bummer.

Gizmodo, Gawker, i0, Jezebel, Consumerist up and down all day is a post from: The Inquisitr