Steemit.com was down for several hours last night into the early hours of this morning. This incident caused panic among users because it's the first of its kind since this platform was created March last year.
A post published by 
According to Webopedia
With this little understanding, we can deduce that today's attack was directly targeted at we (users) of steemit to cause a denial of service so we wouldn't go about doing our daily steemit tasks and when this is done, we get panick and begin to lose faith in the system.
Another question that might interest most steemians is: who are behind the attack? Maybe that's not as important as thanking goodness that steemit dev could overcome this attack and gave me the platform to write this.
So How Does a DDoS Attack Work?
I have a simple explanation from Search Security
The power of blockchain technology is great, resistance to such attack and that's why steemit blockchain was intact today and the attack could only manifest on the website steemit.com while other services on the blockchain were working.