For much of Wednesday and Thursday, Internet Evolution and its sister communities were hit by a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, and we were unavailable for that time.
But now we're up and running. And we plan to stay that way.
We, the editors of Internet Evolution, still don't know everything about what happened. This is a situation where it's best for us to stay out of the way and let our highly competent development team do its job.
The "unusually serious and malicious attack" overwhelmed the datacenter where our servers are hosted, and multiple others across the East Coast, according to an email from Stephen Saunders, managing director of DeusM, the company that publishes Internet Evolution. This is the first incident of this type that we've had in 13 years.
Steve adds:
Unfortunately, DDOS attacks are becoming increasingly common (two thirds of financial institutions were impacted by Denial of Service incidents in 2012; other victims include The New York times, the FBI, Microsoft, Amazon, and eBay). While it is not possible for us to guarantee that we will not be affected again, we are currently undertaking an analysis of our web infrastructure to limit the chance of a recurrence to the maximum extent that is possible.
We'll post further updates as we know them, and as we are free to do so.
One final, very important note: We don't know who the target of this attack was. We may well have been collateral damage in an attack on someone else. At this point, I have absolutely no idea.
If we have further updates, we'll post them in the comment thread below or in a separate blog.
Thank you for your patience and for staying with us.
According to my knowledge adblock started from Firefox, I stopped using firefox too, was a big fan of chrome too but after some times it starts messing around. Now opera is my primary browser.
@Paul- same here I tried accessing the site from my office network, and an error occurred. I though initially that there was something wrong with the proxy server. Then I tried to access from my mobile. I initially thought that the site was down for maintenance.
@mhhfive - I too agree "Being hit by a DDOS means you're big enough for someone to try to take your site down (or at least your web host provider is)."
It's good to know that the site is big enough, but the sad part of the story is that we need to look for a solution to overcome this problem in the future.
@ChrisTOP - yes glad to see the site is back up and running. The recovery process was quite quick. I believe that the IT teams had to work hard to come back online.
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