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
