Server and System Status

The data centre informs us that connectivity on their network was restored at 09:24 UTC.

We have been able to confirm this by accessing all of our servers in this data centre:

• Incoming mail is once again being processed immediately by server NC027, although any incoming mail sent during the disruption may be delayed a little longer until the sending mail servers try again. This is not under our control.
• Server NC023 is also processing email immediately.

We apologise for this interruption. Denial of service attacks (especially distributed denial of service attacks) are extremely difficult and expensive to fight. We have confidence that the data centre did everything they could as quickly as they could to combat this attack.

We have been updated that the denial of service attack against the London data centre is actually a large distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, and it is still underway. Efforts are being made at multiple levels on the network to combat this attack, and we are seeing some movement of email through server NC027, although it took an hour and forty-seven minutes for a test message to get through. This indicates, as mentioned earlier, that the server is up and processing email, but that other servers (and our clients, obviously) are having problems connecting to the server.

We apologise for these problems, but this is affecting a wide range and large number of companies hosted at this data centre, not just NinerNet.

Updates will continue to be posted here as we learn more.

The London data centre has been suffering from the effects of a couple of denial of service (DoS) attacks over the last 12 or so hours. The attack late yesterday (26 December) lasted about an hour and a half. Today’s attack started at 05:37 UTC and is currently ongoing. The data centre staff assure us that they have identified the problem and are implementing a fix for it.

This affects server NC023 (the relay server) and server NC027 (the main mail server), as well as virtual private servers hosted in London. As far as we know, the servers themselves are up and connected to the network, but the attack is causing them to be inaccessible.

We’ll update here as soon as we know more.