Sorry, but anyone know why Live Journal is down????

djxiii · February 20, 2003, 7:59pm

At 1:05 pm EST on Thursday, February 20th, Admin lisa writes :
LiveJournal is currently under a Distributed Denial of Service attack, and has been since about 5:30pm PST (1:30 AM GMT) tonight. We have been working with our upstream providers (including several major backbones) to filter traffic as quickly and effectively as possible.

Due to the fact that a DDOS attack involves potentially tens of thousands of hosts all working together against a single target (in this case, us), it is extremely difficult to find one group of IP addresses to block to prevent the attack from affecting our services any further. Our upstream providers are currently filtering somewhere around 1/4 of the IPs on the internet from reaching LiveJournal. Unfortunately, these filters also block legitimate traffic from some users. When the attack has subsided we will remove the filters.

We will continue to monitor and block hosts as we gather more information regarding this attack. We seriously apologize for the inconvenience, and hope you understand we are doing everything in our power to get the site back functioning as normal.

Additionally, if you have any information as to who or what may be responsible for this attack, please email attack_info@livejournal.com.

bah.

Catamount · February 20, 2003, 9:54pm

Wasn’t this what they were trying to prevent with that whole limits fiasco a while back? Or is the withdrawal affecting my memory.

I hope whoever did this is eaten by rabid pitbulls.

OpalCat · February 21, 2003, 12:24am

I just got to my journal.

Catamount · February 21, 2003, 3:00am

Just what exactly is a DDOS attack? The status page tells us why it made the site crash, but not what it is.

OpalCat · February 21, 2003, 3:44am

Distributed Denial of Service = DDOS

From whatis.com:
*On the Internet, a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is one in which a multitude of compromised systems attack a single target, thereby causing denial of service for users of the targeted system. The flood of incoming messages to the target system essentially forces it to shut down, thereby denying service to the system to legitimate users. *

OpalCat · February 21, 2003, 3:49am

a lot of trojan horse programs allow your computer to become part of a DDOS attack, btw.

techchick68 · February 21, 2003, 5:56am

It’s still acting funky tonight.

Sapphire_Bullet · February 21, 2003, 6:48am

Well, I felt the need to shout into the void and LJ was down. Moment of weakness and all that.

Jessity · February 21, 2003, 7:00am

Spah! I miss you too!

Waaaaaaaah!

OpalCat · February 21, 2003, 8:28am

At this point I think it’s all a matter of what your IP is. If you are in a block of IP addresses that is being blocked, you can’t get in. Fortunately I’m not, so I’m not having problems.

Improbability · February 21, 2003, 11:13am

Yes, they did say that some IPs would be blocked by default in the process. Mine was for ages, but this morning it’s all back according to plan again.

callie · February 21, 2003, 12:21pm

Mine is STILL down! I’m going through withdrawals as I type.

Second_Guest · February 21, 2003, 6:51pm

That seems to be true for me. When I dial up, I get logged on through one of two different IP addresses (I know there’s a different unique address for each dial-up session–I mean the root numbers vary–for example: 207.xxx.xxx.xx or 119.xxx.xxx.xxx), and with one root IP, I can access LJ every time; with the other, I can’t. For the last couple of days, if I’ve needed to get into LJ, I’ve just kept dialing up until I’ve connected with the right one. It’s only mildly inconvenient.

XJETGIRLX · February 21, 2003, 7:13pm

That makes sense, but I’m curious about the sporadic access I’ve had last night and this morning. Even now, I can get to my own journal page, but can’t get to see comments, or the SDMB pages. I can link to and read comments pages that are e-mailed to me, but can’t get to the original journal entry page.

Quel strange.

Super_Gnat · February 21, 2003, 8:34pm

I still can’t get in.

techchick68 · February 21, 2003, 10:52pm

Super Gnat,

Here’s a message from Brad (LJ main dude)

Not sure if your browser is the issue but use that address if it is. If not, your IP address may still be blocked.

Also, they are stated that some IP addresses are still blocked:

http://status.livejournal.com/