Fasthosts DNS Outage Caused by DDoS Attack

Fasthosts’ five-hour collapse yesterday that impacted thousands of UK businesses has been blamed on a Distributed Denial of Service attack and a security flaw spotted on its Windows 2003 shared web server kit.

As statement by Fasthosts explains the issues suffered yesterday –

“As a result of a denial-of-service attack, Fasthosts shared hosting customers experienced a loss of DNS performance, and as a result, periods of website downtime.

In accordance with its procedures, Fasthosts acted swiftly to resolve the root cause, and has now implemented measures to return the majority of its hosting customers back to full performance.

We apologise for any disruption incurred by our customers this morning as a result of this issue. If any customer has outstanding issues, we ask that they contact our technical support team who will assist them.

As a result of our routine and extensive security monitoring, Fasthosts today identified a vulnerability specific to part of its Windows 2003 shared web server platform.

The small affected proportion of our large hosting platform was immediately isolated, and work is being undertaken to investigate and fix the issue as swiftly as possible.

As a precautionary measure, some shared hosting servers on this specific platform have been taken offline, resulting in a small proportion of our hosting customers experiencing downtime. All efforts are being focused on returning this platform to service.”

Fasthosts added that “the security of our customer data remains of paramount importance to us.” It claimed to have “excellent levels of security monitoring, systems and resources to keep our customers’ data safe from threats.”

As they are one of our domain registrars, this affected some services to some of our clients for a period yesterday around lunchtime. We would like to apologise to any inconvenience this caused.