There was a DDoS, as there has been an on going one for quite a while now and you can find so on the mtgox website news section. However it was not a DDoS in t

There was a DDoS, as there has been an on going one for quite a while now and you can find so on the mtgox website news section. However it was not a DDoS in the classical sense that brought mtgox down to its knees but nonetheless a DDoS has occured. mtgox supports a weird feature whereby you're allowed to enter any buy or sell order even if you don't have funds. This means that whenever the prices matches your order the system needs to check whether you actually can with your balance fill that position. Via the api, it is possible to put tiny transaction even smaller amounts than what you're allowed via the webgui. It doesn't take much review of the ask and bid to find out that there were a huge a mount of micro tiny transactions all over the place. Those are in an ever higher volume when system begins lagging furiously and people panic. These are perhaps HFT, or maybe not, but those are the source of the lag and therefore the source of the panic. This is DDoSing and it's also mtgox fault for having a a toy exchange and us bitcoiners for using it. I long ago moved to bitstamp. You can find your local exchange i'm sure.