On 12 December at 5AM our DNS provider will begin performing some scheduled maintenance for upto 6 hours. The DNS service should not be affected but we will be unable to make changes to DNS during this maintenance window.

There has been a fire in a Seattle datacentre which houses some of the servers of the DNS provider we use.

There is currently a limited impact to SoftFooding and it’s customers. Some redirects may not work and we are currently unable to action any DNS change requests. All other DNS services should be running OK but due to the nature of the issue the DNS service is currently “at risk”.

NOTE: All customer websites are hosted at datacentres in the UK.

Update @ 19:05: The DNS provider is currently restoring the lost servers to an alternative datacentre in Atlanta. This should allow DNS changes to be actioned and redirects to be handled.

At approximately 22:30 all five of our globally distributed DNS servers came under a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack. During this time websites that use our DNS servers will appear to be unavailable or access to them will be sporadic. Customers using their own DNS service are not affected by this incident.

We apologise for any inconvenience this incident causes.

Update @ 23:45: All sites should now be available again. The attack lasted approximately one hour and there continue to be intermittent problems. Our supplier of DNS services is investigating ways to mitigate future attacks, which are an unfortunate issue from time-to-time.