1&1 goes titsup, blames lengthy outage on DDoS attack

REALLY? Who would do such a thing?

UK hosting company 1&1 went titsup late on Tuesday night and struggled to recover this morning, after claiming it had been the victim of a Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack.

The website collapsed shortly before 10pm yesterday, and it has taken 1&1 a full 12 hours to get its service back up and running.

Readers who told the Reg about the outage said that the service had been flaky for several hours before it keeled over.

1&1 blamed the downtime on a DDoS attack in a tweet.

We are experiencing a DDoS attack. A status page update with more information will be available shortly at http://t.co/JwR8YuQCpd. ^AN

— 1&1 Hosting Support (@1and1help) December 9, 2014

However, although the website appeared to be returning to normal, 1&1 had yet to update its customers about the status of its system at time of writing.

Customers were still griping about the mysterious outage this morning.

Currently very frustrated about 1&1. All of my websites are down. All 30+ of them. Anybody there who can give me... http://t.co/OabUOq5Z2Y

— JudeeKimberly Rallos (@judeekimberly) December 10, 2014

Indeed, 1&1 was tight-lipped about the cause of the service disruption on its status page, which made no mention of a system security breach.

Last month, Fasthosts blamed a five-hour outage it had suffered on a DDoS attack. ®