Linode: "Large DDoS attacks" in Tokyo (Frankfurt, London)

Tom Paine

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Linode has experienced some DDoS attacks recently in Tokyo, as its status report indicates:

We're currently working to mitigate another large DDoS attack causing connectivity issues and packet loss in Tokyo.
Posted about 14 hours ago. Apr 22, 2016 - 08:57 UTC

I reached out to Linode for comment, and received the following statement attributed to lead network engineer, Alex Forster:

"There were three attacks several hours apart, two of which lasted approximately a half hour and one of which lasted approximately one hour. Linode was being attacked directly, not any of our customers, and the effect of the attack was severe packet loss for a subset of customers (not all due to ECMP traffic hashing)."

"As many enterprises in the cloud can attest, DDoS attacks are ever more common in any shared hosting space. However, these latest hacks have been especially large. Even as we mitigate the attacks, we're working as outlined here to upgrade the Tokyo connectivity situation."

It is important to note that no further problems have been reported since that last report, and no other regions have been impacted.

But talk of "severe packet loss for a subset of customers" is a concern.


Saturday update: Have problems spread to Frankfurt?


Linode Status Report:


Identified
We've identified the cause of these connectivity issues as a large-scale DoS attack. We're working with our upstream provider to mitigate the attack and and harden our network in Frankfurt against further attacks and will provide updates as needed.
Apr 22, 13:07 UTC


The situation appears to have stabilized since then.


 Latest problem spot: London

Degraded Network Performance in London Incident Report for Linode

New Incident Status: Resolved The degraded network performance and packet loss that was affecting a subset of customers in our London datacenter has been identified as related to a large DoS attack that was directed at the entire London datacenter. This attack has been fully mitigated by our upstream provider at this time. Apr 23, 22:23 UTC