All systems are operational.

Due to an issue with our DNS-servers not all services are available to all visitors at this moment. This lasted from around 17:57 until 18:21 CET

DNS connectivity is restored. This was a configuration error on our side as we are finalizing the improvements to our network, sorry for the inconvenience.

After the DDoS attack last Thursday we experienced recurring attacks of increasing magnitude on our infrastructure.

We especially experienced unavailability from 00:11 to 01:12 CET, and from 13:37 to 14:37 CET. This intermittently affected VPSes, hosting and e-mail services.

At this point all our services are operational.

A more complete report and analysis of the events since Thursday will be published in the coming days.

• VPS that required a reboot finished rebooting around 16:15 CET.
• Email sent this morning should mostly have been delivered by now.

• All webhosting came back online between 12:00 and 12:15
• VPSes are back online for the larger part since approximately 12:30. Individual machines may need a reboot. We are still working on rebooting these machines.
• Email has been fully operational again since approximately 12:30. No emails have been lost but, as a result of the outage, it may take a while for emails that were sent this morning to be delivered.

Since 10:10 CET, we have been experiencing outage caused by a major DDOS attack.

All VPSes, webhosting and emailservers were affected by this outage.

We have deflected the attack and worked to recover all systems.

Issue summary

Between December 17th to December and 20th we suffered several DDoS attack affecting Greenhost platform availability at different levels.

Incident timelines

• 2020/12/17 - 09:10 UTC DDoS attack started

  The attack was targeted at a Greenhost customer. The attack unexpectedly also affected also other parts of the network. A significant amount of Virtual Servers had to be rebooted afterwards, including some providing services for shared services.

  Management and core infrastructure were not impacted.

  • 10:24 UTC DDoS attack was deflected and network stabilized. Hosting and Cloud VPS were partially unavailable at this point. Mail was not available. Service center was working.
  • 11:00-11:15 UTC Hosting platform coming back to capacity
  • 11:30 UTC Mail fully operational starting to process the backlog of emails.
  • 15:00-15:30 UTC Cloud virtual machines which didn't seem to be operational were brought up

• 2020/12/19 - 23:11-00:12 UTC DDoS attack

  It may have caused unavailability of some systems or long latency on connections

• 2020/12/20 - 12:37-13:37 UTC DDoS attack

  Systems were unavialable

• 2020/12/21 - 16:30-17:16 UTC Issue with DNS resolution

  Systems were unavailable due to a change on our DNS setup which made DNS resolution not work properly

Root cause

The main cause was a large scale DDoS attack which targeted at least one of our customers and after that towards Greenhost servers as well. This included the Greenhost website as well as our nameservers were targeted.

Affected services

• Cloud virtual machines
• Hosting services
• Mail services
• Service center

Corrective/Preventative actions

• Make DNS infrastructure more resilient and fault tolerant
• Use DDoS mitigation
• Parts of our network design will be adjusted to limit the possibility of a distribution of the attack on the network.