Network attacks July 26, 2012 (resolved)

Today at about 12:26 PM and 12:34 PM (Pacific time), our network was briefly attacked by an extremely high volume of data — a “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attack using forged (“spoofed”) source addresses. The volume of the attack was more than 50 times greater than the usual peak inbound data rate to all our servers combined. This caused Web sites and e-mail we host to be very slow or timeout completely for a few minutes. (All services are working normally now.)

The same attack happened a week ago. Based on what we learned previously, we were able to trace the attack in more detail, and we have identified a specific controversial site that the attackers are targeting. We have moved that site to a different section of our network that can fail without affecting other sites, and we will work with the site owner to move it to a dedicated DDoS protection service.

We apologize for the problems caused by this incident. We know that achieving maximum uptime and availability is important for all of our customers.