At approximately 9:30 PM Pacific time, all of our servers began to experience a large “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attack via attempts to login to blogs using the standard WordPress wp-login.php script. This attack was very broad: it attacked thousands of sites across all of our servers, and it came from a huge number of IP addresses.
Processing these requests caused the overall load on all servers to increase. On “web04” the increase was enough to cause the server to start returning “503” errors for Web page requests.
Our servers already have a set of rules to protect against attacks on wp-login.php, but the rules were not quite sufficient to block tonight’s attack. We added a new rule to match tonight’s attack, and it fixed the problem.
We apologize for the time that the “web04” server returned 503 errors. As you can see by reviewing our blog posts we try to be very proactive to protect our customers’ WordPress sites, and hope that the new security rule will prevent future attacks with the same characteristics.
We occasionally hear from customers saying “my WordPress site suddenly got so slow it’s unusable”. When we look into these, the usual cause is that:
- Our customer has installed a WordPress plugin;
- The plugin attempts to contact another server as part of its normal operation;
- But the other server isn’t working properly: it fails to respond to connection attempts.
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Our business offices will be closed on Wednesday, January 1 to observe the US legal holiday. As always, our support staff will be providing same-day support for time-sensitive issues via our ticket and e-mail systems. However, questions that aren’t time-sensitive (including most billing matters) may not be answered until Thursday, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.
Update 5:00 PM December 27: AOL has resolved the problem described below. All delayed mail has been delivered, and all services are operating normally.
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Our business offices will be closed on Wednesday, December 25 to observe the US legal holiday. As always, our support staff will be providing same-day support for time-sensitive issues via our ticket and e-mail systems. However, questions that aren’t time-sensitive (including most billing matters) may not be answered until Thursday, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.
The PHP developers recently released versions 5.3.28, 5.4.23, and 5.5.7 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded PHP 5.3, 5.4 and 5.5 on our servers as a result.
These changes should not be noticeable, but in the unlikely event you experience any trouble, don’t hesitate to let us know.
WordPress 3.8 was recently released, and as always, we’ve updated our WordPress one-click installer to automatically install the latest version for new WordPress sites.
If you’ve previously installed an older version of WordPress, you should update it from within your WordPress Dashboard.
The PHP developers recently released versions 5.4.22 and 5.5.6 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded PHP 5.4 and 5.5 on our servers as a result.
In the unlikely event you experience any issues, don’t hesitate to let us know.
Our business offices will be closed on Thursday, November 28 to observe the US legal holiday for Thanksgiving.
As always, we’ll provide same-day support for time-sensitive issues via our ticket and e-mail systems. However, questions that aren’t time-sensitive (including most billing matters) may not be answered until Friday, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.
Between 11:32 and 11:36 AM Pacific time on November 11, 2013, the “web04” server experienced very high load that led to an outage for sites on that server. (Other servers were not affected.)
The high load was caused by a RAID array hard disk that suddenly became very slow to respond to requests. The disk was automatically reset and the server resumed working normally. We’re keeping a close eye on this and doing further testing, and will replace any defective hardware if necessary.
We sincerely apologize to our customers affected by this problem.
