We Have Been Hit By Fork Bomb But We Made It

Tuesday, July 27, wasn't the best day we have ever had at Cloud.bg and we would like to apologize to all Cloud.bg customers for the interruptions of the service we had today.

It has been caused by a Fork Bomb (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_bomb), a form of Denial-of-Service (DoS) Attack. It hit Cloud.bg twice on July 27 and caused 2 interruptions of service. We had to reboot our Cloud infrastructure of servers today at 2.30 pm (GMT), July 27, 2010, because of a very high average load on the cluster of servers. We have rebooted it at 2.35 pm (GMT) and the Cloud.bg came back online at 2.45 pm. The HTTP (Web) returned at 2.50 pm. Total accounted interruption of the service was less than 30 minutes.

Two hours later Cloud.bg experienced second interruption of the service. It was at 4.30 pm (GMT). We have managed to bring all the services back online at 5.05 pm (GMT)

Why Did You Experience Downtime?

We have announced on Cloud.bg Facebook page, in Cloud Twitter account said that it was a Fork Bomb. Someone attacked the cluster system of Cloud.bg. It didn't take us a lot of time to bring the services back online. However at the time when Im writing this message our System administration team is still working to destroying all running copies of the Fork Bomb.

The good news is that your Cloud Accounts are safe and no data was lost!

Usually when there is an unexpected failure of one of the servers part of the Cloud.bg, the cluster infrastructure reconfigures automatically in order to avoid the downtime. The first time when Cloud.bg received DoS attack, the system had already started its own procedure to return all the services online. However we got a few calls from customers who were quite impatient, which we fully understand! So we by-passed the procedure!

Wrong! The effort to speed up restoring the system to its normal state actually increased the downtime a little bit, because we didn't work on the cluster to find the source of the Fork Bomb! To be honest, I should say that at the time when we have published this Announcement - System Status of Cloud.bg - Interruption of Service from July 27, 2010, we didn't know there was one!

The last information I've got from our System administration team is that system is stable and we do not expect another service downtime! We will give you more information about the outcome once we have some.

Once again, please accept our apology about the troubles. This time we were not the ones to bring them to you! We can not guarantee that any DoS attacks or other issues would not happen in the future. However we guarantee that your websites are in a good hands! We manage and cary for your Cloud Accounts with great attention! Thank you for your support! We appreciate it a lot!