This morning, DrakNet experienced high packet loss and timeouts as Liquid Web was hit with a Distributed Denial of Service attack. Severe packet loss began at roughly 8:30am Central, and continued through about noon Central, when it began clearing up. Traffic has been steady for a few hours now and we believe that the situation is stable at this time and fully cleared up.

The situation was discussed in real time on Web Hosting Talk:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=689611

as well as on our offsite Network Status page, located at

http://networkstatus.drak.net

The explanation regarding the Network slowdown that is being sent to LiquidWeb clients is as follows:

Here’s what happened with the DOS attack:

A large inbound Denial of Service attack saturated connections to one of our providers. As a result some inbound traffic (that which gets routed over that provider) experienced high latency and timeouts. Only certain clients were affected.

What we’re doing to prevent this in the future:

As this was a problem with connections from the upstream provider, there was very little we ourselves could do to prevent this from happening. We have no control over what top-tier providers people will access our network with. Customers accessing our network through that particular top-tier provider were the ones experiencing the most difficulties.”

For those wondering, the un-named provider was AT&T.

All servers were affected to differing degrees depending on what route you took to the servers, though we did see continuous activity on all four of them (though admittedly, not near as much as would normally be expected). The billing/support server, Live Chat module, the backup DNS and MX server, and the offsite Network Status site were all unaffected.

We sincerely apologize for any outage you may have experienced. Sometimes, the incestuous relationship on the Interwebs is a great thing with cooperation and exchange and wonderful speed and reliability - and sometimes it’s like a bad game of “Ring Around the Rosy” where everyone keeps going in a circle and one falls down and takes everyone else with them. Today was, unfortunately, one of those latter days.

Quite frequently on the chat list, we get an email sent to it that asks the proverbial question “Is XXXXX.com down, or is it just me?”. Well, now there’s a web site that lets you ask the same question:

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/

Type in a domain name, and the site will let you know is the site is down for everyone, or if it’s just you. If it winds up being just you, grab a staff member on chat, or email support with your IP address so that we can check our firewall and see if you set it off and got yourself blocked, which is usually the most likely scenario when it winds up being “just you”. Don’t know how to figure out what your IP address is?

http://whatismyip.com/

will tell you your IP address - we need your computer’s IP when those things happen, not the IP of your web site. We already know the IP of your web site.