For the second day in a row, residents have had trouble getting inworld. People couldn't log in, or if they were already in, they'd be logged out. People had trouble bringing up the Second Life webpage as well as Marketplace. Yours truly couldn't get on until after 7PM SL time. Curiously, Firestorm was also described as being down. There was naturally speculation about the cause. One person wondered if one of the twelve employees Linden Lab recently let go had something to do with it. Others suspected a DDOS, or Distributed Denial of Service, attack.
Finally just after 11AM SL time, April Linden finally announced the cause, an unusually large DDOS, one that the Lab stated were "at a level that we rarely see."
The grid is currently undergoing a large DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. Second Life being hit with a DDoS attack is pretty routine. It happens quite a bit, and we’re good at handling it without a large number of Residents noticing. However, the current DDoS attacks are at a level that we rarely see, and are impacting the entire grid at once.
My team (the Second Life Operations Team) is working as hard as we can to mitigate these attacks. We’ve had people working round-the-clock since they started, and will continue to do so until they settle down. (I had a very late night, myself!)
Second Life is not the only Internet service that’s been targeted today. My sister and brother opsen at other companies across the country are fighting the same battle we are. It’s been a rough few days on much of the Internet.
We’re really sorry that access to Second Life has been so sporadic over the last day. Trying to combat these attacks has the full attention of my team, and we’re working as hard as we can on it. We’ll keep posting on the Second Life Status Blog as we have new updates.
Image Credit: Spooked Dreamscape
Bixyl Shuftan
my internet went out, area wide just seconds after i crashed in sl yesterday.
ReplyDeleteMy experience from the UK was little better until yesterday evening by which time April's blog post had been made. The FS blog server was swamped by FS users trying to log on (the viewer uses the server to generate the startup splash). All seemed back to normal by our evening.
ReplyDeleteBack on Monday, I came home (IRL) that evening to find myself disconnected from Second Life and thought I was just disconnected randomly. When I couldn't log back in, I didn't know what was going on and I really needed to get back on because I had an event at the Gathering Oak that I needed to get to. I had got on and got pole dancer Lilly Mouse on shortly before the event was to start with Becky Shamen showing up, but I was disconnected again along with Lilly Mouse and got Facebook IMs from Becky Shamen that she couldn't get back on either.
ReplyDeleteWe thought that the Gathering Oak event was screwed at this point, but at around 10PM (EST), I managed to get back on SL and got Becky Shaman along with at least half my club attendees able to show up minus one dragon dj. The event was barely able to continue at that point with a small club as someone had gotten the music stream going, and I was able to stay on SL with pole dancer Lilly Mouse for the rest of the night.
During that time, I was finding out there are rumors of a DDoS attack going on from what I was getting from other groups I'm a member up. There was also this message that was posted in one of the groups I'm in that I managed to send out as a notice to the Sunweavers Group and my own group.
Sent by: Miro Collas
Login Issues Round 4
See https://status.secondlifegrid.net/incidents/vkb5crh5dbl3 and http://etitsup.com/slstats/
Clearly there are serious issues with SL and/or the 'net backbone. These are NOT related to FS.
Please avoid making purchases or rezzing no-copy items.
FS servers are also down, due to getting overloaded (the viewer pulls the splash page from our servers).
The following morning around 10PM (EST), I found that I was disconnected again and couldn't get back on. For a while during that time, I was monitoring a thread in the Second Life Community forums as well as logging into another known grid, InWorldz, and going to its visitor entry and welcome point, the InWorldz Desert Island, to see what refugees from Second Life might be showing up instead and if any mention of Second Life's connection issues come up there by anyone to try to figure out what is going on being that it has now the second day this is going on.
Even though I use InWorldz for emergencies and another place to hangout since I know some people over there, as well as for really private meetings with Becky Shamen regarding Keiki related stuff, I did not get much valuable information there and later found out from an official LL Blog post that it was an "Unscheduled DDoS Attack" with the rumors being true according to one April Lindon.