Blender confirmed that the recent site outages were caused by ongoing DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks that began on Saturday.
Blender is a popular 3D design site for creating animated movies, video games, motion graphics, visual effects, soft body and particle modeling, and more.
The project team says the attacks began over the weekend, causing them to be unable to process legitimate connection requests, resulting in major disruptions.
“Since last Saturday, November 18th, blender.org’s servers have been under DDoS attack; our servers are crashing, overloading them with requests,” the message reads.
“Administrators have been working non-stop on this. Attempts to block the IP ranges from the attackers were unsuccessful as they quickly returned from other locations.”
Even during the brief periods in which the attackers suspended their attacks, Blender’s infrastructure remained overloaded with large volumes of legitimate requests pending, making it difficult for their servers to catch up.
Finally, after four days of continuous issues, the team moved their main website to CloudFlare today, which they say helped reduce the impact of the attacks.
Statistics published by Blender’s COO, Francesco Siddi, on X show that the attacks are ongoing, with more than 240 million fake requests directed at the project’s servers.
In order to access the site, some users need to solve the “problem” of bot filtering. “blender.org” may still be down for technical reasons, but “www.blender.org” is working. The websites hosting the Blender code, developer docs, devtalk, wiki, and download portal are still down. The attackers responsible for the attacks on Blender and their motives are currently unknown.
If the crashes resume over the next few days, it’s important to note that downloading Blender from third-party sites or advertised Google search results can lead to malware infections.
If you want the Blender installer and the official site isn’t working, you can always get the DRM-free version from Steam, which doesn’t require the Valve client to run.
Blender is also available through GitHub, and Windows users can also get it directly from the Microsoft Apps Store.