Freeparking hit by DDoS, vexed customers scream into abyss

Outage-prone company does impression of whore's drawers

Email and hosting biz Freeparking has run into yet more trouble after being hit by a DDoS attack today.

One customer told us this morning: "I have several domains which rely on Freeparking's name servers. All of them have been unresolvable since around 8:50am."

Another got in touch to say the site went down before 9am, saying the outage had also hit customers' hosted sites. Email services were also offline.

In a statement Freeparking said: "We are working in co-ordination with our data centre team to mitigate this attack as soon as possible."

Earlier the company had tweeted:

We are currently suffering an attack on our DNS servers, so some DNS records may not resolve. Updates at http://t.co/tN4wUDYd5C%3c/a>

— freeparking.co.uk (@freeparking) June 9, 2015

Customers have already been grumbling at not having access to their emails and websites from domain names and web hosting company Freeparking for more than a week, due to a migration issue.

One customer said he had been without email since 25 May.

At the time of publishing, customers were still reporting issues related to the attack. On Twitter they said:

DOS attack on #freeparking causing web and email outage on our Ed and Family companies. Media ok as hosted elsewhere.

— Stuart Lee (@stuarthlee) June 9, 2015

@freeparking Last update was an hour and a half ago. Please let us know likely ETA so we can decide whether to move sites.

— buscms.com (@buscmscom) June 9, 2015

@freeparking what the hell is going on? More comms needed

— Berni (@guncupboard) June 9, 2015

Paul Lomax, chief executive of the company, told us in a statement: "Today’s DDoS attack was severe and our team worked tirelessly to get the DNS back as quickly as they could. Our tech team and data center teams have been meeting to have a debrief and discuss their findings."

"We will ensure we implement any changes needed to mitigate future attacks as best we can," he added.

"It was a great testimony to our customers’ understanding and patience to see so many messages of thanks in both the comments of your DDoS article and on Twitter, once the team had stopped the attack and brought our DNS back online," he concluded. ®