Some of our customers may have noticed “high packet loss” today from about noon to 12:25 PM (Pacific time). This could make it seem like Web sites hosted on our servers were loading slowly, or even timing out.
The problem has been resolved by our upstream provider, but we are working with them to make sure it doesn’t recur.
If you use WordPress blog software on your site, be sure to upgrade to WordPress 2.8.4 as soon as possible. The upgrade contains important security fixes.
Although all WordPress users should upgrade right away, we’ve added security rules to our servers to protect our Web hosting customers who haven’t yet upgraded. Other people may find the rules useful if they use mod_security on Apache Web servers. The rest of this post contains more technical details.
Customers on the “flexo” server experienced a four-minute interruption in Web site service between 9:48 and 9:52 AM Pacific time this morning (August 12).
E-mail was not affected, and customers on other servers were not affected.
The problem happened when the Apache Web server did not respond to a “graceful reload” command when we installed a “mod_security” update to block certain attacks against the WordPress blog software.
We are looking into the root cause of this incident and will take steps to prevent it from recurring. We don’t consider any kind of service interruption acceptable, and we sincerely apologize for the problem.
