14 DAY TRIAL // VPS cloud hosting provider Linode has been experiencing outages due to distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks for the past few days, with the first attacks starting on Christmas Eve.
The attacks continued on Christmas Day, but on December 26 they reached a point at which they started to be noticed by most of the company's customers who began complaining about outages on their servers.
Almost all of Linode's infrastructure was affected, the DDoS hitting data centers in Atlanta, Fremont, Newark, Dallas, Singapore, and London.
The attackers kept the DDoS barrage going all the subsequent days, every day until yesterday, January 1. The attacks are likely to continue today as well.
At the time of writing this article, the Atlanta data center showed a status of "Major Outage" on the company's server status page.
Out of all nodes, the Atlanta data center seems to be the primary target, with Linode reporting attacks on it almost daily.
Over 30 DDoS attacks in the past week
The company says that the initial DDoS attacks targeted all of Linode's authoritative nameservers, causing DNS hosting outages, and its public-facing website, causing Linode Manager outages.
Linode engineers then reported a change in tactics, with Layer 7 (“400 bad request”) attacks that caused Linode Manager outages, and attacks on the colocation provider’s upstream interconnection points, causing significant congestion/packet loss due to overwhelming the router control planes.
Additionally, Linode has also seen large volumetric attacks toward Linode network infrastructure, also causing significant congestion/packet loss.
"It has become evident in the past two days that a bad actor is purchasing large amounts of botnet capacity in an attempt to significantly damage Linode’s business," said Alex Forster, a Linode engineer, in a statement on the company's website.
"Over the course of the last week, we have seen over 30 attacks of significant duration and impact," he also added. "As we have found ways to mitigate these attacks, the vectors used inevitably change."
Linode plans to reveal more details about the attacks as soon as they stop.