According to a Channel 6 report, a firewall issue caused the San Diego County Registrar of Voters website to crash shortly after the first batch of election results were posted Tuesday night, June 5th. The County is conducting an investigation into the source of the attack.
IT services provider Hewlett Packard determined that there were no software or hardware issues related to the outage, and reported that the site received over 1 million hits per minute from a single IP address. Firewall software then kicked in, detecting suspicious activity and shut down the site.
Investigators are still looking into the problem, and are searching for ways to prevent such an attack in the future.