It's a little more complicated than that. The PITS feed was on civicapps.org as a public data source, and many people used it for various applications, including myself.
There were two different approaches to accessing this data. My application (FireCom for Android) and another individual's app (FireCom for iPhone) were on demand, so when the person using the app requested the data, it would hit PITS, parse it and return it to the app. This uses the same amount of load as someone going to the website.
Other applications that attached to it used more of a polling model, so they hit the site every few seconds or minutes and grabbed the data, and stored it. If anything new came along, they'd store the new updated calls. This creates an additional load on the site, equivalent so someone visiting it once a minute, or whatever interval was set. (Much higher load)
Recently, the website started to slow down considerably, and ( I assume ) WCCCA wanted to eliminate any outside sources of problems. They put a CAPTCHA on the site to prevent robots from crawling the site and getting the data anymore. At this point all applications stopped working.
Then one of the people developing the polling style application bypassed the CAPTCHA mechanism, and at that point WCCCA decided to remove the web portion altogether. I don't have any official communication with anyone at WCCCA but I believe the two to be related.
The PITS system was running on an old server with old software so it likely wasn't handling the load very well. With a new system upgrade in the works it likely wasn't worth their time to try and figure out how to make it run.
*** Disclaimer *** I am not affiliated with WCCCA in any way and don't speak for them.
I just wanted to put this info here because as far as I know WCCCA was not hacked, and I don't want that information spreading around. Rumors travel fast, and that one could shake the confidence of the public, and/or damage the reputation of the agency and that wouldn't be fair.
