Unfortunately, Litecoin was attacked today. The network ground to a halt as large transactions were flying in, and pools were producing small (or even zero) transaction blocks.
What happened?
An attacker has been spamming the network with with dust transactions. Each transaction is costing the attacker roughly 0.09 LTC ($4.00), which means the attacker either has a lot of money to waste, or some of the LTC pools are responsible for the attack (because they just mine the fees back).
Because of all of these dust transactions, the mempool (unconfirmed transactions) has been filling up on many litecoin nodes, causing issues processing deposits and sending transactions. This has resulted in several major LTC exchanges including Poloniex, BTC-e, and GDAX all disabling LTC deposits/withdrawals.
Why is this happening?
It's believed that AntPool and BW may be responsible for the attack. This is unconfirmed, but evidence points to them, as they are producing blocks with very few transactions which means the spam transactions take a long time to confirm, thus clogging up the mempool.
It's possible that this is also an attack from large Bitcoin stakeholders now that Segwit is passing on Bitcoin on the 1st of August.
Is someone doing something about this?
The Litecoin Foundation and Litecoin Association are both aware of the issues, the issue was discussed in the private slack. It's unknown at this time whether there will be a software fix for the spam, or if the issues will simply resolve themselves.
In the meantime, all you can do is wait... You can find out updates on the official Litecoin slack or at the reddit
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