A number of hosted websites (including www.sonic.net) were offline for a approximately seven minutes this afternoon. We’re investigating the initial cause that caused the servers to drop out but believe a known bug in our load balancer configuration was also triggered that prevented all of the sites from being automatically brought back online.
Update: Thu Jun 28 10:16:44 PDT 2012. We’ve seen a couple more events since this happened yesterday and we believe we have identified the DoS attack and are working to mitigate its affects now.
Update: Thu Jun 28 13:13:41 PDT 2012. We’ve installed a custom apache module that should eliminate or, at least, reduce the affects of the DoS attack on our web cluster and are hopeful that this will prevent this issue from causing problems again.
-Kelsey, William and Kevan