[Service-warnings] Sporadic outages affecting some May First/People Link members

[Jamie McClelland]

Servers Affected: albizu allende amaru assata blanco bola bolivar bouazizi  brown chavez debord debs dolores dorfman dorothy eduardo fred fuller gil hashmi hay hubert jones katanko keller ken kiyoshi leslie lora lucius lumumba malcolm mandela marcos marquez marx menchu mirabal morales moses negri peltier proudhon ranciere robideau roe severo sontag stallman toussaint tresca viewsic vilma
Period Affected: Starting 2011-09-24
Date Sent: 2011-10-04

May First/People Link operates servers in two co-location facilities.

One of the facilities, Telehouse, has experienced sporadic outages over
the last ten days due to a distributed denial of service attack
targeting the company that provides our Internet connection (Hurricane
Electric).

A distributed denial of service attack means that a person or group of
people with access to many computers are intentionally trying to shut
down Hurricane Electric's network.

Our servers at Telehouse use that network to access the Internet so,
when it's shut down, our servers can't access the Internet and, as a
consequence, your websites and email can't either. Rest assured that
there is no data loss attached to these outages: your sites and email
archives are completely protected and email you are sending or receiving
during the outage will be delivered when we're back on line.

This problem also affects thousands of providers and server-owners
nationwide who also use Hurricane Electric.

It is a horrible burden on our members and one which we, as an
organization, take very seriously. We are now discussing what to do
besides carefully and aggressively monitoring the measures HE is taking.

Hurricane Electric has been working to stop these attacks and has
reported being successful in countering each one. However, they are
reporting that the attackers are changing tactics to adjust to their
defensive measures, which is why the attacks are continuing.

At this time, we can't say for sure whether the attacks are over. We may
experience more brief periods of downtime.

So far, we've experienced several partial and intermittent outages:

 * Saturday afternoon, September 24 and Thursday evening, September 29
   for about 5 minutes.

 * Monday evening, October 3 for about 2.5 hours

 * Tuesday morning, October 4 for about 30 minutes

 * Tuesday afternoon, October 4 for about 10 minutes


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