A well-known and pseudonymous blogger, “Carles”, who ran a popular indie music blog called Hipster Runoff (popularly referred to as “HRO”), published a post in early 2012 which was unflattering to Grimes, among others he had previously posted. She didn’t like this, so in March 2012 Grimes enlisted a friend in the video game industry to send a Distributed Denial of Service attack (a type of attack intended to knock someone’s systems offline) aimed at this blogger’s website. She implies her friend who was employed at the video game company used his access to the company’s systems to perform this attack. The video appears to be edited as she is making this statement.
I was able to find an interview written by Motherboard which describes the attack from the blogger’s perspective, which sounds quite a bit more involved. The author of the piece, who eventually went on to become VICE’s Editor in Chief, wrote that the site’s backups had also been destroyed and its server crashed, which implies a bad actor or actors gained access to his system(s) through a strategic, malicious hack, which would be far more involved than simply sending large amounts of traffic to cause a DDoS attack.
Here are several relevant excerpts from that interview: