Reason for recent Mumsnet site down / outage?

[MoleSmokes]

What was the reason Mumsnet went down recently? I saw on an FWR thread that the last time this happened was in 2018.

Apparently there were Mumsnet-haters on Twitter celebrating the outage, some tweeting “Oops!” - with a suggestion that the outage might have been due to a Denial Of Service attack or Distributed DOS attack, connected to the launch of a new Women’s Rights campaign website that was being discussed on the Feminist Chat board.

Was Mumsnet down due to a DOS or DDOS attack?

If it was, has Mumsnet identified the attackers and/or reported the incident to Action Fraud?
www.actionfraud.police.uk/a-z-of-fraud/distributed-denial-of-service-ddos

Was that the case MNHQ?

The message I got was that it was down for planned maintenance

"last night there was a network failure at our data centre. (I think this means an internet hamster came off its wheel.) The engineers fixed it overnight and the site was back up around 3 am"

They took the site down when the problem occurred as opposed to it being planned I think.

@ShowOfHands

"last night there was a network failure at our data centre. (I think this means an internet hamster came off its wheel.) The engineers fixed it overnight and the site was back up around 3 am"

They took the site down when the problem occurred as opposed to it being planned I think.

I think so, first it was just down and then the message came awhile later about planned maintenance

If it was planned maintenance wouldn't we be informed in advance? I imagine MNers overseas, indifferent time zones would want to know especially, and Premium account holders.

Whilst maintenance does happen on a Fri night it was for about 6 hours and 3 or 4 threads were rapidly deleted prior to that happening, also the Twitter mob was seething about the content of those threads.

I was concerned that another data breech had happened and it was damage control.

Given that we are adult women, and many of us understand tech, an explanation of what happened (and yes we do understand mistakes, and/or bad luck happen) would be much preferable to an infantilising 'internet hamster'

I’m not sure why the internet hamster is always the scapegoat.

I’m sure Jen has just borrowed the internet for another Reynholm Industries presentation again.

sounds like there was planned maintenance which shouldn't have caused an outage but someone cocked up while they had all the pieces out all over the floor and thus the site was unavailable for a bit.

It does happen

@BernardBlackMissesLangCleg

sounds like there was planned maintenance which shouldn't have caused an outage but someone cocked up while they had all the pieces out all over the floor and thus the site was unavailable for a bit.

It does happen

Don't forget the piece left over when they've put it all back together.

To be fair to HQ, that quote was taken from a thread where posters were already talking about hamsters. They were responding in kind.

Hi all

Sorry about this - we had an issue our end with a network failure, which is resolved now. Nothing untoward going on! Hopefully that'll be the last we see of that.

Thanks for the info. Good to know that the smirking trolls on Twitter had nothing to do with it.

Glad that Moss and Roy were not responsible either @LilyMumsnet

There was a problem that affected many different networks over the last couple of days or so, because of a revoked certificate. I'm not a techie, but I am the mother of one, who spent considerable extra hours working to fix the issue.

The best I could do with google terms was to find this:

www.auscert.org.au/blog/2021-01-15-quovadis-issue-impacting-multiple-customers

which may have been the problem.