<p>I am not a Chicago applicant, but some of the angry responses that have been posted regarding the University’s technical difficulties rather rile me. What their servers have just experienced is akin to a distributed denial of service attack, one that is very hard to stop and control, especially when the requests are manually user initiated. The best solutions for control and prevention of DDoS attacks are either very expensive or very blunt. On the one hand, the University could implement costly DDoS prevention measures including geographic distribution, reverse proxying, and content distribution networks. While I am confident that Chicago administers its network very carefully, it is by no means its main job to provide high-availibility, fault-tolerant hosting. The admissions office has no control over that anyway and simplistic suggestions such as ‘they should bring more servers on’ disregard the logistics of running something as seemingly simple as an admissions portal; scability issues, data contention, and other issues arise, and the money that could be used to address those issues are well spent elsewhere. At the very least, those checking their decisions should be glad that at least some are able to view them. The response of many upstream providers to a DDoS attack is to blackhole the servers in question, meaning that those admissions servers would be effectively off the Internet and no one would be able to view their decision at all. Please take a moment to consider the admissions office’s job - selecting qualified applicants, not catering to a twice-a-year hosting issue - before complaining that you had to wait all of so many hours before being able to view your decision.</p>