An update on our recent DNS issues

Hi, I’m Luke, one of the system administrators at Heart Internet, and I just wanted to give you some details regarding the issues that we’ve been experiencing over the past two weeks.

Over the Christmas period, we have suffered frequent distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. The attacks were pinpointed at our authoritative nameservers, which resulted in DNS lookup failures for a great many domain names hosted with us and our resellers.

Similarly, other major websites and webhosts have been targeted as well, including the BBC, Steam, and Linode.

By flooding our nameservers with malformed DNS lookups, the botnet prevented legitimate DNS queries from getting a response, resulting in the DNS error you may have seen.

Unfortunately, because the tools we have in place to help our Customer Services team were partially reliant on our nameservers, they couldn’t submit updates to our status page to keep our customers informed.

We apologise for the disruption caused and the lack of updates throughout.

We are working closely with our networks team to mitigate the threat further, and are also working on improving our infrastructure resilience against such attacks, including ensuring that our Customer Services team is able to update the status page in situations such as these.

There will be a follow-up post regarding the future of the status page soon, and, again, we apologise for the disruption caused.