Was FlyerTalk down Friday the 13th?
 

I could not even open FlyerTalk from any direction from about 1:00 pm US ET forward, yesterday. I have not received any email notices of new comments on threads I watch since then, even now.

One is never sure if it is one's own computer, or the system, so, guys, any comments? I do see in the "Slow / Timing out" thread that people seemed to be having problems on and off on Thursday the 12th. Perhaps there was an assault on Friday the 13th? Or a problem on the 12th cascaded on the 13th? Of course, it seems quite a coincidence that it would be spontaneous on Friday the 13th. Wouldn't it be just like a vandal to act on the 13th.....

Thank you.

I couldn't log on during Friday or this morning, although I'm on a different time zone to you.

yes i think it was down because the website would not even open up

It was down most of thursday and friday both. Along with most of the other sites listed on www.internetbrands.com fora publicly traded company they have a TERRIBLE network status system(none that i found)

that was my experience as well.

hope the problem was resolved.

This is simply unacceptable from Internet Brands, they need to get their act together.

My employer (major company) corporate computer system was down all day yesterday (coincidence?) With that, and not being able to access Flyertalk, I was sure I had network troubles at home. Rebuilt the whole damn thing - then gave up. Well, it was a rainy day anyway.

I have a friend who used to run Yahoo Mail. Fairly early in his tenure there, his team was responsible for a multi-hour outage. He waited to get called in to someone's office, to be fired, etc. It never happened. So he finally approached one of the execs, and was told not to worry about it. The general attitude was "It's a free service, let them ask for their money back."

For me it was down by mid-day and I couldn't get on again until I stopped trying around 7pm.

Yes, it was cause big problems with cyber-attack due to FlyerTalk is down all day long. I couldn't get on the message boards at all. So unfortunately, they will have to being fixed. It should have to be more patience if they are running back to normal.

Um, do we know for certain it was a cyber-attack as opposed to homegrown IBB incompetence?

It's not users who access FT, etc. for free that IBB has to answer to; it's advertisers. It's just inexcusable for the whole IBB empire to disappear off the face of the earth for most of a business day.

Still no email alerts.

Are you receiving them?

Administrators, any word?

Thank you.

What happened? is it fixed?
 

I'm sure I'm not the only one who would appreciate learning what occurred.

There was an announcement posted by IBSteph stating that there was a cyber-attack.

Thanks. ^ I missed it at the top.

Hunky dory, but bracketed "Nov 14, 09 until Nov 16, 09 "
 

:confused: 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.

In Asia, FT was sort of available last Friday during the day. I wasn't able to access FT since late Friday and throughout the weekend in Taiwan. I even tried to google and see if there's any site down "announcement" but didn't find any. I thought no IB people was working on it since it's weekend. I assume I would have to wait till Monday (U.S. time) since IB hasn't had a fast response time to FTers technical "needs" in the past.

I decided to give a last shoot just now and found out FT is finally back. It must just happened in the last 3 hours or so. I believe the downtime was more than 50 hours in my region.

I would think at least IB/FT could have sent an email (or something similar to TalkMail) to give FTers a headsup since the site wasn't available. Nothing in my email from FT/IB the whole time.

Sad to know it's due to a cyber attack though.

From Korea, couldn't get in from Friday until now. Although I did receive a couple of emails about threads I was following. Seems back to normal, although I couldn't reply here using the Quick Reply feature.

Just back on in New Zealand. Professional Pilots Rumour Network has also been down for roughly the same time as FTand just checked - it has come back on also.

It seems OK now. Will the issue fixed for now? What is the cause of the issue?

There's an admin note posted at the top of every forum:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/dinin...blems-340.html

Still intermittent glitches--I've had to reload a couple pages in the last hour--but FT's at least usable now.

1) Well, here it is the 16th (per Stephanie's announcement).

2) No email alerts here. Is there something we can do at a master level to re-set this function? I think it's a per-thread command, though I've posted several comments. And, by the way, to cblaisd's comment: +1 (actually, several).

3) Some people have indicated that some of the problems we've encountered have been the result of measures implemented to protect us, to keep the bad guys from moving through IB into our sets until everything is truly hunky dory. Plausible? It could explain the long delay in getting the email alert function running for some of us.

4) God, is my email inbox barren, these last three (four?) days.....


**********************
To my #2, following Efrem's instructions (thank you very much) in the pre-crash thread about this, I see that all my subscriptions are set to "Instant". Just wanted to add this so no one goes to the trouble of helping me (thank you very much). The other comments still stand.

It's not exactly a reliable board.

Sure, this particular weekend could've been due to a DDOS attack. But what about the *other* times we've had unplanned outages?

And this from the company that OWNS the BB technology this board runs on. Amazing.

Received notice today at 9:54am US ET of DullesJason's comment @9 of two days ago on this thread. The first and only email alert since Friday the 13th.

Sporadic connection issues today. Hopefully things will stabilize later today.

Same here. Plus, email notifications have stopped again (for me).