Code sharing website GitHub has been hit by the largest DDoS attacks the website has ever seen, and it came from Mainland China.

It's unclear exactly who the attackers are at the time of writing, although it's likely an organization with ties to the Chinese government.

The attack focused on two areas on GitHub: Greatfire.org and The New York Times' Chinese language website. Both parts of the site are blocked in Mainland China.

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Greatfire.org is an anti-censorship organization that allows Chinese citizens to wrestle control away from the "Great Firewall", but is currently blocked in China. Users capable of installing VPN in China without being shut down are able to access the site.

It's seen as an affront to the Chinese government's blockade of several Western websites like Facebook, Google Search and YouTube. Several news sites have also been blocked in China, including The New York Times.

The attackers were able to create a redirect from Baidu.com -- China's most popular search engine -- sending billions of searches to GitHub. The servers GitHub has in place can't handle that type of traffic, and the site crashed for a few hours.

After 18 hours, GitHub announced most of the systems had stabilized. Baidu has denied responsibility for the redirect. The Chinese government has not responded to requests for comment on the issue.

It's one of the first times a state sponsored attack has used DDoS as a means to take down a website. Normally, state sponsored attacks use smarter tactics to avoid detection and inflict real damage on the website.

TagsGithub, DDoS, hackers, coding