Linode's crippling cyber-siege enters day four

Virtual server host Linode has been on and offline since Christmas Day as it weathers an ongoing denial-of-service attack. Four days in, its customers are getting grumpy.

Status page ... Linode still suffering days after attacks began

"We are currently aware of a DoS attack that is affecting the Linode Manager/Website and our Dallas datacenter. This post will be updated as soon as we have more information to provide," the biz said in the wee small hours of Christmas Day.

While billions settled in for the end-of-year festivities, floods of network traffic overwhelmed Linode's systems in Dallas, Texas, and took parts of its website down. By 3am on the 26th, the waves of packets seemed to be dying down, but then the attackers shifted their sights to the company's other data centers.

Later that day, Linode's data centers in Atlanta, Georgia, and Newark, New Jersey, took hits – as did the company's London hosting center. The assailants then started hammering the Dallas data center again, effectively knocking people's virtual servers offline.

Atlanta, Newark, and London were brought back online a day later, although the two US data centers, plus a third in Fremont, California, were soon floored again. Now it seems only the Dallas site is under attack, causing "degraded performance," according to Linode.

Punters have been venting about the situation, with the linuxadmin and webdev subreddits getting complaints. With little more than stock statements coming out of Linode, some users are threatening to move to rival services, such as Vultr and DigitalOcean.

A spokesperson for Linode was not available for comment. ®