Service outage - Distributed Denial of Service attack

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Dear all

In relation to the service outage incurred today, we wanted to let you all know that this was caused by a very significant distributed denial of service attack on our network.

What happened:

Originally it started out as an attack directly on a single website @ 13:42, which we mitigated almost immediately with no affect to services, but it escalated at 14:25 to a very severe distributed denial of service attack at a much higher level above our entire network.

Unfortunately a DDOS attack is not something any hosting company can prevent happening, but we can and were prepared for one, resulting in only 15 minutes of website unavailability, and email was not affected during this time.

Prevention of future downtime:

Our upstream network providers at datacentre level is in a process of network upgrades that improve the routing infrastructure utilised for customer connections. Part of this work would have involved the migration of our service to the new infrastructure under a forthcoming planned maintenance window.

We took this opportunity to bring forward this planned re-provision of network services onto the upstream providers upgraded network infrastructure which is better able to handle and mitigate such large DDOS attacks, so that any future attacks are dealt with far quicker and result in little or no downtime.

We are sorry for any interruption to your services on this occassion, and sincerely reassure you that the new measures put in place today will make such an event far less disturbing in the future, should it happen again.