Users of Ancestry's sites may be experiencing problems just now. The US site (and many of its collateral sites) yesterday suffered denial of service attacks, and the UK site seems to be affected today also. The latest from Ancestry.co.uk half an hour ago:
Unfortunately, the issues we were experiencing yesterday continue today and our service is not currently available. We will keep you posted as we have news to share.
UPDATE: (5:45pm BST): We continue to work to restore all services, nothing new to report.
Hopefully it will be sorted soon! Latest updates at https://www.facebook.com/AncestryUK.
UPDATE: Ancestry's Chief Technology Officer Scott Sorenson has commented on https://www.facebook.com/AncestryUK that the site's current problems have been stopped - I've just checked, however, and still can't get into the UK site, so there may be some residual issues they have to deal with.
Chris
Now available for UK research is the new second edition of the best selling Tracing Your Family History on the Internet: A Guide for Family Historians, whilst my new book British and Irish Newspapers is also now out. And FindmyPast - please reinstate the original Scottish census citations on your new site.
I have to say that looking at Ancestry's Facebook site - there's no situation that poor PR can't make worse. About 19:30 today (Tuesday), a message came up to say that "Distributed Denial of Service Attack Neutralized". I had tried to find confirmation earlier of whether it was a DDoS and failed. The PR bunnies were writing things like: "the issues we were experiencing yesterday continue". Issues? What issues are they? The cynics immediately think, "If you're not telling us exactly what's going on, then it must be your fault." And so they provide ammunition for the green-ink brigade to berate Ancestry, asking things like, "Where's the back-up?" At least if they had said "DDoS", then some of us could have tried to educate the others.
ReplyDeleteI was only peripherally involved in one ot two DDoS attacks in my IT career - so far as I remember, you can't simply shut it off, because then you shut everyone off - exactly what the attackers want to happen. Instead, you actually have to build a bigger inlet into your system to soak it all up and somehow identify what you can dump and what you can't. Anyway - the point is that you can't just "fix it" by repairing something.