Image copyright Getty Images Image caption John Oliver has spoken about the importance of net neutrality legislation before
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) website was deliberately attacked on 8 May, the regulator has said.
The incident began hours after comedian John Oliver criticised FCC plans to reverse US net neutrality rules.
Mr Oliver urged people to post to the site's online commenting system, protesting against the proposals.
The FCC said that issues with the site were caused by orchestrated attacks, not high volumes of traffic.
"These actors were not attempting to file comments themselves; rather they made it difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file with the FCC," chief information officer Dr David Bray said in an official statement.
"While the comment system remained up and running the entire time, these distributed denial of service (DDoS) events tied up the servers and prevented them from responding to people attempting to submit comments."
'Trolling the trolls'
In his Sunday night show Last Week Tonight, Mr Oliver called on viewers to visit a website that would direct them to the correct page on the FCC site to leave their comments.
"Every internet group needs to come together… gamers, YouTube celebrities, Instagram models, Tom from MySpace if you're still alive. We need all of you," he said.
His plea came after FCC chairman Ajit Pai said in April that he would review rules made in 2015 that require broadband companies to treat all online traffic equally.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption EXPLAINED: What is a DDoS attack?
Last December, Mr Pai said in a speech that the net neutrality laws were "holding back investment, innovation, and job creation".
"Mr Pai is essentially trolling the trolls," Chris Marsden, professor of internet law at the University of Sussex, told the BBC.
"If you bait John Oliver, you reap what you sow."
The FCC will vote on Mr Pai's proposals to revoke the legislation on 18 May.
Late Sunday night and Monday morning, the website of the United States  (FCC) became unresponsive, which interfered with attempts by the public to express their views on the proposals currently up for comment, including one about .  Although comedian  on his show '''' had asked his viewers to inundate the website with comments supporting Net Neutrality, the FCC says a DDoS () cyberattack, not angry  fans, are responsible for their website's issues.

John Oliver in 2013.
FCC Chief Information Officer David Bray explained in a formal statement that FCC.gov's problems did not come from a large volume of complaints and comments, which is what Oliver had asked his fans to make, but from sabotage. "These actors were not attempting to file comments themselves; rather they made it difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file with the FCC," said Bray.

Net Neutrality is the idea that Internet providers should not be allowed to speed up or slow down access to certain websites, which would presumably be done for payment.  In 2014, the U.S. government ruled Internet providers must be held to standards similar to those of telephone companies and changed their legal classification to fall under Title II of the , which gave the FCC the legal authority to order them not to give preferential treatment to high-paying customers.

In response to a previous Net Neutrality proposal in 2014, John Oliver did a segment on the fifth episode of ''Last Week Tonight'' explaining the difference between Title I and Title II status and asking his viewers to flood the FCC's websites with comments supporting regulation.  Approximately 4 million did so, and the website crashed.  Sunday night, Oliver asked the public to repeat the performance, recommending comments to make and providing a single link to take them to the exact part of FCC.gov required: "America needs you to rise — or more accurately, remain seated in front of your computer screen — to this occasion," said Oliver on the air. "So please, fly my pretties, fly once more!" Again, the FCC website soon suffered problems.

Despite Sunday night's issues, the FCC still received tens of thousands of comments on the proposed relaxing of the 2014 regulations, which is up for a vote on May 18.


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