Update on tonight’s site-access issues

In case you aren’t on Facebook or Twitter, where we have been talking about this for going on four hours now: Our server-management company WiredTree, historically wonderfully reliable for the years we’ve used them, has been dealing with a “denial of service attack” that took down many of the sites who run on its servers. For at least an hour, that meant no one could get into our site; then at some point, we noticed some people were starting to get in, and finally figured out that access had been restored for everyone but Comcast users. We switched immediately to our Qwest access and got right in. Not sure why that happened – the folks at WiredTree have been working frantically to figure out how to get around the attack; perhaps they had to block Comcast. Checking the logs again, it appears Comcast users ARE now starting to get through, so hopefully this means everyone’s access is restored.

Though we had no direct technical control over this, we of course apologize – as a 24/7/365 news service, we are committed to absolute reliability, and have taken many other steps toward achieving that, but this is a new one, so we’re exploring how to set up redundancy that would kick in immediately if anything like this (or another server problem) happened again. Thanks for your patience and support! We’ve got a few more stories in the hopper that had been waiting for things to normalize, so back to the news …

4 Replies to "Update on tonight's site-access issues"

  • pam January 27, 2011 (6:39 am)

    Thanks for the update! Love WSB!!

  • JD January 27, 2011 (10:53 am)

    Is there a technical explanation for this or is this a hacker problem?

    • WSB January 27, 2011 (11:04 am)

      I linked to the explanation via Wikipedia of denial-of-service attack. It is a malicious attack. It wasn’t directed at us specifically, but at our server-management company, which has hundreds of clients, and they were affected too (if you are on Twitter, search on the term wiredtree and you’ll see all the anguished notes from last night). No explanation for why someone was targeting WiredTree – I will be checking later today for their followup/followthrough – Tracy

  • Pascal January 28, 2011 (9:28 am)

    Hello,

    I have a VPS with Wiredtree : all my sites are down since about 24 hours. Support page
    https://grove.wiredtree.com/
    is not available since more than 15 hours at least (before, I was sleeping, so I don’t know). I have sent two emails : no answer after 15 hours.

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