Hi all,
As you're all probably aware, over the past week we've been having major issues with disconnections and server outages, causing a great deal of frustration for everyone! We really do sincerely apologise for all this trouble and if we could have avoided it, we would have. So I just wanted to do post a small explanation of what's been going on and what is being done to fix it all.
Recently our provider has been heavily attacked by highly sophisticated DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. A typical DDoS is usually when thousands of "compromised" PCs simultaneously send large amounts of data to a single IP and overload the target's network so much that no other communication is possible. Fortunately, several months ago our provider implemented substantial DDoS protection and most of the attacks are never even noticed.
However, in this case it wasn't just a large attack, it was also a very sophisticated attack, targeting our provider specifically (for those technical people, it was a BGP related routing attack). The provider was already aware of these flaws in their network and were already planning to implement an entirely new (and awesome) core network infrastructure to avoid these vulnerabilities. But due to the nasty attacks last weekend, they had no choice but to urgently proceed with their network upgrades. The unexpected upgrade was partly why we had so many outages for the following days, while they performed various maintenances.
During these outages, it also gave us the opportunity to upgrade our system software and performance various maintenances, since few players could even get online. It also helped us see some of our own flaws and areas we could improve our handling of network issues. So much progress was made!
I believe the upgrade is almost complete and I don't believe we need any more interruptions.
Hopefully soon we should have a much more stable network connection
-Add.
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