Yesterday, at approximately 3:00pm CST it appears that our database cluster experienced a very heavy load from a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. This caused some services to become slow or unresponsive for a short period of time. We had the problem diagnosed and amended by 4:00pm CST.
Although we don’t know the exact cause yet, we believe it may have been a failed attempt to breech the security of that server cluster.
We are going to be taking steps in the upcoming days and weeks to further tighten website security, as well as database resiliency to ensure this does not happen again. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
