Stack Overflow went out for about an hour on Sunday morning due to a DDoS attack, TechCrunch reported. Stack Overflow is a question and answer website focused on coding that programmers, both professional and amateur, rely on.

Stack Exchange, the parent firm of Stack Overflow, told TechCrunch that the site went down because of a DDoS attack on its network provider. According to Webopedia, a DDoS attack or Distributed Denial of Service is a kind of DOS attack "where multiple compromised systems-which are usually infected with a Trojan-are used to target a single system causing a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. Victims of a DDoS attack consist of both the end targeted system and all systems maliciously used and controlled by the hacker in the distributed attack."

Stack Exchange added that the issue has already been "partially mitigated" and the platform is already operational. A 100% free site that does not require any registration, Stack Overflow allows anybody to ask and answer a question. Users vote on the best answers and they then go up to the top.

Posts about the outage began to hit micro-blogging site Twitter and Hacker News at about 11 am Pacific Time Sunday. The notes, often humorous, of programmers served as a testament to the importance of the platform to a lot of people, the report said.

Some of the Twitter posts about the outage featured in the TechCrunch report included one from Adam (@adamjstevenson) which said, "Stack Overflow being down reminds me how badly I need Stack Overflow in my life." Another one came from pickett (@pickett) which said "Well, stackoverflow is down.  Might as well pack it in and take the day off." Vineet Shah (@vineetshah), meanwhile, posted "Came to work on a Sunday and Stack Overflow is down EVERYBODY PANIC."