Craigslist Crashes In Canada. What The Heck is Happening?

Craigslist is down in Canada. The company has 55 cities on its network of local classifieds and they are all offline and have been since late last night.

Why? Going to the site reveals a header of "domain tou violation," with a very vague explanation: "Technical issues are currently affecting access to craigslist Canada sites for many users."

Some users have been saying certain cities are back up, but most are still experiencing full outages. It is not at all clear what the reason behind this massive crash is, but one message appeared on the site stating that "The website formerly operating at this domain violated craigslist's Terms of Use and/or enabled or facilitated others in violating the TOU, and/or infringed craigslist's trademark(s) or other intellectual property." Again, a very ambiguous and strange way to handle such a significant outage.

"Craigslist does not permit automated posting or the employment of posting agents (software or human)," continued the notice. "Users who post non-local or irrelevant content, repeatedly post the same or similar content, or otherwise misuse craigslist's services detract from the user experience for all craigslist users."

Craigslist has been reached out to by several media outlets but has failed to respond. There is speculation of a denial-of-service attack but typoically these follow public warnings, which did not occur in this instance.

We'll update you as this mystery unfolds.