Web host The Planet under DDoS attack!
This is huge breaking news… and the story is already 28 hours old.
The Planet, which is the world’s largest host of dedicated web servers, has been undergoing a distributed denial of service attack that their employees claim is larger scale than anything they’ve ever experienced.
According to a January 27, 2009 Cisco company press release, The Planet is host to 25,000 customers and serves more than 14.5 million websites.
Could this be the Conficker worm at work?
Is any other botnet capable of doing this kind of damage?
The attack against their DNS server began at around 11pm CDT on April 6. Hosted sites were affected until at least 7am CDT on April 7. That’s eight hours of downtime.
Then last night, on April 7, the attack renewed. It’s now almost 5am EST and there is no end in sight, according to employees in both the technical and sales departments.
Any sites using either nameserver are affected: ns1.theplanet.com and ns2.theplanet.com
In addition to The Planet’s DNS server being inoperable, “Orbit,” the company’s customer portal is also down via both domain name and ip address.
The Planet has a 99.9% uptime SLA guarantee. That equates to eight hours and 46 minutes of downtime in a year. In the past 28 hours my site, Torrent Maid, is pushing almost twice that downtime.
Unbelievably, there has been no communication between the company and its customers. No emails. No phone calls or text messages. All informational updates must be vigilantly gathered by calling their support line (obviously tickets can’t be opened because the portal is also unreachable, even to the company’s own staff).
Perhaps The Planet will argue semantics and claim that this wasn’t a real issue since only the DNS servers went down. I would love to review the SLA at theplanet.com/legal but I can’t get to it DUE TO THE DOWNTIME.
Regardless, it’s sad that I was alerted to the downtime by my own users and still haven’t received an email (apology or explanation) from the people I pay monthly.
I can’t believe TechCrunch, Wired, Gawker Media— even MSNBC, etc— haven’t picked this up. It has spanned three business days and affects a giant portion of the internet. It’s a newsworthy story that doesn’t belong on my personal blog.
