ManageBac was hit by two distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks at 5:32 pm EST on Wednesday, April 24 and again 6:57 pm EST. The total downtime was just over 2 hours and 26 minutes. There was no data loss, but users were unable to connect during much of the evening.
A DDoS attack occurs when there is a flood of Internet traffic targeting a server and consuming all resources, thereby blocking legitimate traffic.
As a precaution, our hosting provider RackspaceCloud null routed our servers at 7:22 pm EST i.e. all external traffic was blocked, so we setup a load balancer within the RackspaceCloud network and routed all traffic back in two phases: HTTPS traffic was restored at 8:41 pm, and HTTP traffic was back at 8:56 pm.
We apologize for this and our team was working to return systems to normal immediately after receiving the first downtime alert via Pingdom. We have added traffic filters and an additional load balancer, so if this re-occurs we will immediately route traffic again to minimize any disruption.
