Story by: Clarissa Hawes @ FreightWaves.com

Starting early Thursday, small-business truckers who rely on the spot market began reporting problems logging in to the DAT load board to find freight.

While the DAT online load board and mobile app are back up and working now, DAT told FreightWaves that a “rare, unforeseen problem” resulting from a scheduled maintenance upgrade caused its load board to slow to a crawl as users tried to access its system early Thursday.

“It has to do with basically the amount of data running through the system,” Jeff Hopper, chief marketing officer of DAT, told FreightWaves. “It was running at capacity, which is partly why we were updating the system, to handle more capacity. It was just an unforeseen problem where the system couldn’t handle that load volume during the initial turn-on [after the updgrade].”

Engineers worked frantically Thursday to purge old data, which took several hours until the system could handle the “capacity to run at full speed,” Hopper said.

Some truck drivers were concerned that DAT, headquartered in Portland, Oregon, had been hit by a ransomware attack similar to the one that struck its competitor, Truckstop.com, a few days before Christmas.

However, Hopper said that wasn’t the case.

“It wasn’t any kind of security issue with malware or ransomware attack at all,” he said.

Owner-operators who rely solely on the spot market told FreightWaves they were struggling to find loads and were sitting in their trucks waiting for the DAT system to come back up Thursday.  Some said they switched solely over to DAT after leaving Truckstop.com following the ransomware attack on its system.

Story continues HERE @ freightwaves.com

Source and credits: freightwaves.com /Clarissa Hawes /  iTrucker  / Mario Pawlowski