What is a DDOS and why do the leakers complain about it?

A DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack occurs when a large coordinated group of computers overload the system supporting a website so the legitimate users can't access it. There are many different ways that this can be accomplished, so it's hard to predict the error message or response that you will get from a website that is under attack; most of the time you will receive either a "timeout" error message or a "system busy" type of message. Starting in late December, the Eccieleaks website has been down for days at a time. They have claimed in posts, emails, and tweets that it was due to a DDOS attack. They have blamed different parties for the outage, but because of the bizarre comments that were made about the incident, many doubt that there actually was an attack aimed at the Eccieleaks website. Whether it happened or not, the leakers have whined about it regularly in attempt to garnish sympathy. They have also signed up for CloudFlare to protect them from DDOS attacks.