U.S. coding site GitHub is experiencing the largest DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack in github.com's history that had caused intermittent outages. GitHub said attack began around 2AM UTC on Thursday, March 26, and involved a wide combination of attack vectors, as well as some sophisticated new techniques that use the web browsers of unsuspecting, uninvolved people to flood github.com with high levels of traffic.

"Based on reports we've received, we believe the intent of this attack is to convince us to remove a specific class of content," Github said.

Earlier today, Github said all their systems were reporting at 100%, although the attack traffic was continuing.

The security firm Insight Labs noted that massive amounts of traffic from the large Chinese search engine Baidu were "hijacked" in the attack on GitHub.

Researchers said the GitHub attack appeared to be aimed at knocking out censored sites including the Chinese edition of the New York Times and GreatFire -- the websites that circumvent China' s censorship, and whose online service came under attack this month.