Not sure when Stephanie's announcement that things should be hunky dory went up, but the email alerting isn't hooked up yet. Also note that she is bracketing the problem as lasting until the 16th...

That is the date that the announcement will be posted until, not related to the actual outage.

I warned about this before, but incompetent FT technical staff does not want to listen...

There's a Flyertalk Twitter page, but it only had one update yesterday evening.

I'm leaning towards the attack/hack too -- during a brief time I could get to the homepage, there was a link to a warez site on it.

Yeah, I just saw it. That's why FT has temporarily down for more than 24 hours. Is that getting better tonight? No more cyber attacks?

Apparently not. I'm not getting e-mails for new posts on subscribed threads and I gather others aren't either.

Has anyone either received a PM, or sent one that you know reached the recipient, in the interim?

And thanks, sbm12. Are you hearing anything else?

Yes.

It showed all the signs of a DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack, except that my understanding is that it was a massive attempt at brute-force hacking into their vBulletin databases. The effects from our perspective (as long as the hack is unsuccessful) are the same. DDOS just using massive but normal server requests that overwhelm the servers; the hack has a more specific & sinister intent.

Personally, I would hope that they went along with it (in cooperation with law enforcement) long enough to try to find out who was controlling the bots. Blocking the IP addresses in this situation simply blocks PC's that are already hijacked. You have to go upstream to their ISP's & see where the command & control traffic for the exploited computers is coming from.

Most if not all of the advertisers are pay per click advertisers such as AdSense. They'll miss the boards a lot less than IB will miss the income.

Good! Its doesn't happening again in the future if they are have any cyber attacks again in the future. So that's why FT is temporarily down all day long. Let me know if they have any cause another error problems. If you should have to do installed AVG 9 but, it is very good anti-virus control onto your computer. You must to protected with emails or any problems the website is another viruses.

Looks like email alerts are back up. I only have a couple of forums subscribed, but those email alerts came out at 11:07 and 11:14 pm, respectively, Alaska time.

many of us in Australia are still having to break in via hidden proxy servers but no-one seems to care as there has been no response to any threads pointing out the problem.

Perhaps the Southern Hemisphere will just disappear?

I still can not access flyertalk normally. I have to use the online proxy server to access it in China. But I asked my friend in Canada and he can access it without problem.

Is this issue location related?

I'd hazard a guess that IB has implemented some sort of location-based blocking to nullify the DOS/hacking attempts. Either those who are having issues share IP space with the evildoers or IB has implemented their blocking methods very sloppily.

You can believe whichever one you want...

I was in Japan until about 10 hours ago, and FT was unavailable to me for the entire period of outage, right up until I shut down to board my flight. I'm at LAX now, and its working, so I suspect some non-US sites still aren't getting through.