A company is experiencing a web services outage on the public network. The services are up and available but inaccessible. The network logs show a sudden increase in network traffic that is causing the outage. Which of the following attacks is the organization experiencing?

The organization is experiencing a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. A DDoS attack overwhelms a target system with a flood of malicious traffic from multiple compromised sources, making the service unavailable to legitimate users. The description of a "sudden increase in network traffic" causing an outage, despite services being "up and available but inaccessible," perfectly matches the characteristics of a DDoS attack. ARP poisoning involves manipulating MAC-to-IP address mappings on a local network, which wouldn't typically cause a public web service outage due to overwhelming traffic. A brute-force attack attempts to guess credentials and doesn't manifest as a traffic-based outage. Buffer overflow attacks exploit vulnerabilities in software by writing too much data to a buffer, leading to crashes or arbitrary code execution, not a network traffic-induced outage.