Site outage update

[RebeccaMumsnet]

Hi everyone,

First and foremost: sorry for the loss of usual service over the last few hours.

To explain what's been going on: shortly after 10pm last night, we started receiving a large amount of spurious (i.e. automatic, rather than human) traffic. This is known in the trade as a denial of service attack: one in which a person, or organisation, deliberately floods a website with requests for pages, with the intention of overwhelming its servers and preventing bona fide users from accessing the site.

It goes without saying that we're doing everything we can to repel borders and keep the site up and running. We'll post on our social channels with any further updates (we're over here on Facebook and Twitter, if you don't follow us already), and in the meantime, thanks, as usual, for bearing with us.

MNHQ

@Bassetfeet

I believe my password was hacked . I googled the day site was down. Just the word 'Mumsnet' . Under the banner headline is the choice of chat ,aibu. Under the title 'I am on' .....my unusual password came up before the usual chat. It has made me very cautious now. No way that password was not hacked.

Hi Bassetfeet,

Thanks for your post.
Tech have looked at this and there is an explanation that I will pm you shortly so as not to give away any personal information. You can decide if you wish to add that information to the thread or not but we have no reason to believe that your account was hacked.

As we have previously said, it is best practice to regularly change your password and create a password that contains capitals, numbers and lowercase, the longer the better. Please do feel free to change your passwords.

Thanks Rebecca .

Thank you . I understand now. Sorry for alarming folk! Am a bit a new learner the internet world .

Rebecca can you confirm that our passwords were encrypted please

Hi DollyTwat, Just looking in from my hols - yes, user passwords are definitely encrypted and we don't store them otherwise but will certainly make sure Tech team sees this and will see if they can shed any light.

Does Justine not have MN blue post anymore?

That is weird!

i think it's because Justine is logging in from Elsewhere, not MNHQ - maybe that's why.

having trouble posting.. which telling you here is futile..

Now what's happening with the site?

Problems here trying to stay on without getting the blank screen every now and then followed by not being able to get on at all

Mumsnet Twitter site says it's nowt to do with Jeffrey but it seemed a bit DDoS-esque.

MN have commented on Twitter but no explanation other than it wasn't our good friend Jeffrey this time.

It really was a database issue this time - no reason to believe it had anything to do with Jeffrey. That said we do think Jeffrey is still around and not for a moment complacent. Will be posting a summary of exactly what has happened thus far and where we currently stand shortly. Thanks for your patience.

I did an a search on a poster yesterday and though she was merrily posting away there was absolutely no history of her when I did a search.

She was posting but didn't appear to exist.

Weebirdie - that might be an unrelated search problem but please do report details to contact us and tech can look at it - if you have the time?

txs

I'm glad Justine is back to being blue. I should imagine that, particularly after the little episode some months back, her account is surrounded by a ring of steel - but the blue is still reassuring.

I think you may have to keep an update status running for the duration, HQ. Many people would likely have thought 'Oh it's Tuesday, so it must be DOS day' this morning when the site was having some difficulty - even though it may have been unrelated to any such problem. A bit of a PITA (and I'm sure you have to weigh up the reassuring of users against the denial of the oxygen of publicity) but it could be worth considering.

Yes me too, cozietoes - blue is where I'm at.

We will certainly aim to be more responsive - tricky call, as you say don't want to feed the troll, but think folks need reassurance and transparency is best bet.

Sounds good to me.

site's currently pretty much cocked up on my phone (no other site is, so don't think it's a problem my end)

Mine keeps doing that, usually a refresh sorts it out.

often it does for me too but not always. It's been like that all day this time.

It's amusing to remember the original meaning of DOS. (As in QDOS.)