Former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler says there was no net neutrality cyberattack in 2014

Former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler says that there was no 2014 cyberattack meant to overwhelm the agency's comment system during the net neutrality debate, as claimed by a former agency IT official in emails recently published by Gizmodo. The Gizmodo story says that in 2017, after the agency claimed to have experienced a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) taking down its comment system, agency IT chief David Bray told the media that there had been a similar attack in 2014 — and that Wheeler had decided to keep the matter quiet for fear of copycat attacks. 

On June 6, Wheeler said, "When I was in the greenroom waiting to come in here, I got an email from David Bray, who said 'I never said that you told us not to talk about this and to cover up,' which was the term that got used. Which of course is logical, because as the Gizmodo article that you referenced pointed out, A) FCC officials who were there at the time said it didn’t happen, [and] B) the independent IT contractors that were hired said it didn’t happen. So if it didn’t happen it’s hard to have a cover up for something that didn’t happen." Brays claim to Wheeler is contradicted by a 2017 email from Bray published by Gizmodo where he says that in 2014 “the Chairman did not want to say there was a DDoS attack out of concern of copycats.” Bray said June 6 that his reference “the Chairman” in the published email was actually shorthand for the agency’s media relations office.
He also maintained in an earlier Medium post that there had been suspicious activity related to the comment system. "I go with the email that I literally just received from David Bray saying I didn’t say it," Wheeler said when pressed on the discrepancy. Asked why the FCC might have suggested in 2017 that there had been an attack three years prior, Wheeler replied: "I am the last person in the world to interpret the decision making of the Trump FCC.”