Subscribe-O-Matic unavailability details
Let me start with an apology. I am extremely sorry for this recent Subscribe-O-Matic outage and the trouble it has caused. One thing I’m personally always proud of is the reliability of our service. Even though we host thousands of groups and help you send millions of messages each month, we haven’t had any major outages in the last 3 years, apart from a few minutes of maintenance every now and then. Yet in the last 24 hours, Subscribe-O-Matic was unavailable for over 8 hours. So what happened?
Even though we have started switching away from MediaTemple (our old hosting provider) in March, there were still a few fail-over services running on our old server. And more importantly, the DNS records for Subscribe-O-Matic were still hosted there. A few hours ago, MediaTemple became a target of a DDOS attack which resulted in their DNS servers becoming unavailable. This rendered all their services and customer sites unreachable, including Subscribe-O-Matic.
Even though we do have a fail-over server, it still relies on DNS service being operational. I already moved the DNS records to our new provider, but the changes need some time to propagate across the net. At the time of this writing, MediaTemple engineers have managed to restore most of their network availability, so Subscribe-O-Matic should be reachable by most of you. I’m also implementing some changes in how we handle situations like this to make sure a similar outage doesn’t happen as easily.
I received a lot of messages about the outage and even though I’m not able to reply to each and every one, rest assured I’m working hard on getting this situation resolved – I understand how much trouble and frustration this has caused to many of you.
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