Fastmail seems to be down

[hans2010]

Originally Posted by TenFour

According to the Fastmail Status page the DDOS attack is still impacting things. https://www.fastmailstatus.com/

The above post was from last week. For today (Oct. 31), the above link says:

We are seeing continued DDoS attacks against our infrastructure and are working with our network provider on mitigation strategies. Our team are working hard to provide stability.

I wonder if the Internet can evolve to where DDoS attacks can be throttled at source.

[evfrson]

Seems to be back now.

[n5bb]

Due to the nature of the defense against these attacks, some locations may be affected more than others. I haven’t noticed a complete loss of Fastmail services during the past few hours, but at times the system was much slower than normal.

Originally Posted by hans2010

.. I wonder if the Internet can evolve to where DDoS attacks can be throttled at source.

The initial D in DDOS stands for “Distributed”, and this complicates the problem. If the attack packets are arriving from thousands of unrelated zombie infected devices from a wide range of locations, the old routing systems can’t throttle them at the sources. Many techniques have been proposed to add features to internet routers to allow them to be commanded to block attacks, such as:

https://www.faculty.ece.vt.edu/parkj...arch/AD_CR.pdf

https://www.cs.unc.edu/~jeffay/cours...ddos-src02.pdf

I don’t know if any of these have been actual deployed on a wide scale basis. For most of these techniques to be useful, I believe that they need to be deployed at the vast majority of edge routers where packets enter the internet.

Bill

[xyzzy]

Seems to be working again (at least for me). Status page has been appropriately updated.

[Berenburger]

Originally Posted by NJSS

I can check spam at POBox, but not my webmail - very frustrating.

The webmail package (Mailstore) is one whole with that of Fastmail.

[lauricat]

Out for me in AUS.

[Terry]

Yea same here...west of Bris

[astrodog73]

Out now.... Newcastle...
It was out early this am too...

[evfrson]

Out for me in the UK too (again).

[bertradio]

As before, IMAP client (Thunderbird) gets mail with no problem. The issue seems to be with the web interface.

[DumbGuy]

I may be having some luck connecting in to webmail (and POP via desktop client) by connecting in from other countries via my VPN service. It's hard to say for sure, as FM access may be intermittent anywhere during the attack.

[astrodog73]

We're back...

[NJSS]

Originally Posted by Berenburger

The webmail package (Mailstore) is one whole with that of Fastmail.

Yes that was my point - a retrograde step I fear.

I am gong to have to rework my setup which has been unchanged since well before FM acquired POBox.

NJSS

[xyzzy]

Ugh, still out.

This is the longest I've been without access since I joined FM a few years ago. Maybe this is an argument against depending on using aliases (or those masked addresses) and just using a single email address and filtering off that (assuming that would even work should we ever get the system back to make such a change). I use a forwarding service so I could just point it to some other email service but that won't help with the aliases.

[evfrson]

I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that if I want guaranteed reliability then I am going to have to use one of the big providers Google, Microsoft et al.
I use my own domain name so it would be very easy for me to do that.
I am going to see how this week pans out and then decide.