We wanted to let WP Engine customers know that one of our 3rd party data center vendors suffered its second major DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack for today.
Depending on where your sites are located, they may or may not have been affected. Our own website and other tools were also affected.
While it’s not possible to prevent every DDoS attack, our security team is working with our 3rd party data center vendor to minimize the probability of future attacks.
Thank you for bearing with us as we rectified this issue.
For Those Unfamiliar With the Term DDoS
A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is when traffic is flooded through one point. The amount of traffic is so large that it keeps anyone from accessing a site.
Think of it like a highway—highways are only designed to handle so much traffic. When too many cars are added at once, it creates gridlock.
DDoS attacks are malicious attempts to flood the highway to the server. The traffic comes from multiple, distributed places.
Providers must identify which sites are the target of the attack, and mitigate the malicious incoming traffic. What makes it complex is that they must simultaneously allow clean users to access the site.
In some environments, like that of our third party vendor, the traffic comes in through a few access points and then disperses to individual sites.
During attacks like the ones experienced today, the initial entrance points flood with such a large amount of traffic that all sites go down.
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