The server hosting provider (Linode if you want to go read about it) has been suffering a denial of service attack over the last several days, which has caused intermittent availability of our forums. It has been the worst since Christmas day.
They are working on fixing the issue, but it is basically the digital version of a mob attack, so it is hard to deal with. Hundreds of thousands, if not more, botnet machines (typically personal or business machines across the planet that are infected with botnet malware) are hammering their network, using up the bandwidth and switch capacity and keeping legitimate users out.
Thanks for all you do for the site Dave. Kind of the man behind the site. I know you are like the rest of us. Not a lot of time to deal with extra work.
Linode has been getting hit with DDoS attacks since Christmas Day, and it looks like their pain is set to continue. The attackers are rotating DDoS traffic through various regions of Linode's service. They say, "All of these attacks have occurred multiple times. Over the course of the last week, we have seen over 30 attacks of significant duration and impact. As we have found ways to mitigate these attacks, the vectors used inevitably change. As of this afternoon, we have mostly hardened ourselves against the above attack vectors, but we expect more to come.
Paul Breitweiser
2016 STX Champion FRS Raven Black
Thanks guys. Not much we can do at this point but wait on them to figure it out.
Just to clarify, it isn't an attack against us directly, it's against all the servers and sites that Linode hosts. I haven't seen a group take credit for the attack, so I assume they're trying to extort Linode into paying them to stop the attack.
Looks like only the Atlanta Linode region is still under major attacks...all other regions are fixed. They will divulge who the attacks came from when over.
Paul Breitweiser
2016 STX Champion FRS Raven Black
