Backstory here: freegeoip.net has an hourly per-IP limit, so we distributed the load by doing the geolocation from client browsers. This borked freegeoip after many hours of Twitter/Ars Technica'ing.

It was a good thing Github got its storage servers back up; we're now running a local clone of freegeoip, as freegeoip.net smolders.

To freegeoip.net! May it rise again soon.

haha, yeah, we noticed freegeoip.net is effectively getting DDoS'd a few hours ago: https://twitter.com/mhashemi/status/333407761993957376

But it seemed to be holding at the time. Hopefully a local copy of the geodata will work better.