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We're seeing an ongoing attack against our primary network provider
- pdappollonio 5y agoFrom Twitter: > We're seeing an ongoing attack against our primary network provider. We're working with them to block the attack and restore access. https://twitter.com/Fastmail/status/1451374471344918533 https://twitter.com/Fastmail/status/1451374471344918533
- polynox 5y agoFastmail now reports they're "under attack": > We're seeing an ongoing attack against our primary network provider. We're working with them to block the attack and restore access.
- tedeh 5y agoMore and more services keep going down on fastmailstatus.com. Some that don't work (for me) are still marked as up, i.e. CalDAV. Edit: CalDAV is now marked as down too.
- kiwijamo 5y agoIt's been showing all services as down for quite a while already.
- hcurtiss 5y agoFirst time I can remember them down.
- system16 5y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25863731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25863731
- verdverm 5y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=fastmailstatus.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=fastmailstatus.com
- Eiriksmal 5y ago>I'm a happy Fastmail customer, but the number of outages recently has been a little concerning. From that thread 9 months ago, who goes on to complain about not having post mortems sent to him via Twitter. I've been using Fastmail since 2014 and can't remember a time I couldn't log in and access my email. I'm sure the service has gone down in the past 7 years, but I can't tell any difference from Fastmail's uptime vs Microsoft's for Outlook 365 and Google's for GMail. I just read some emails before opening HN and seeing this, in fact. Their caching works well enough that I didn't even know they were down. Now it's showing that it can't connect to the server. Well done, Team Fastmail--that's pretty slick.
- berkut 5y agoOut of interest, when you say 'their caching', what do you mean? One of my annoyances with their iOS app is it doesn't support offline mode which is fairly annoying...
- BitAstronaut 5y agoYeah, I haven't noticed any outages. Of course that doesn't mean they don't exist, but it has had zero impact on me.
- whichdan 5y agoSame, I've been on Fastmail for 14 years and this is the first time I can remember them being down for more than a few minutes.
- junon 5y agoHugops, attacks are never fun.
- luckman212 5y agoGood luck to the FastMail team! Long time user, there is no better email service! Hope whoever is attacking them gets struck by lightning.
- happytiger 5y agoThat’s so specific its almost a curse. :)
- someoneiam 5y agoI agree! Never been happier with an email service and hope whoever is attacking them gets struck by a second lightning, some years after the first.
- mcadwell 5y agoWholly agreed! I've been with Fastmail almost since the beginning and I hope whomoever attacked them gets EDS (if they don't already have it), they suffer from identity theft, and none of their batteries work forever after...right after they get up off the floor from being hit by lightning multiple times!!!
- nixgeek 5y agoFrom the status post, they use the term "primary" which implies they might have more than one network provider. Unclear whether Fastmail is the target, or if the attack is against someone else network-adjacent to them and is just large enough to congest the provider. If the latter, wonder what prevents just withdrawing the announcement and resuming service using the secondary or tertiary provider?
- fsckboy 5y agoseems to me MUCH more likely they know it's the former, and their primary implies higher capacity. your speculation rests on the idea that they are incredibly stupid not to think of using the redundancy they built in.
- throwawayboise 5y agoHeh. Could not log in, check HN, it's the top story.
- Gigachad 5y agoI can log in and have been receiving emails so I guess its back now.
- beeboop 5y agosame
- throwawayboise 5y agostill down for me.
- BitAstronaut 5y agoStill down for me.
- sammy2244 5y agoShouldnt they be using some sort of ddos protection?
- ejj28 5y agoFastmail was pretty good while I was a customer, but this sort of thing is partially why I switched to Google Workspace. Google might be terrible for privacy but at least I can trust them to not get hacked or knocked offline. If they ever decide to randomly lock my account or anything I can always just point my domain back at Fastmail. Good luck to them and hopefully they'll be back online soon!
- sydthrowaway 5y agowhy is google immune to an attack?
- ejj28 5y agoThey're a much larger company with massive infrastructure that dwarfs Fastmail's? The traffic Fastmail is accustomed to dealing with is likely nowhere near the amount of the traffic that Google deals with.
- jeffbee 5y agoYep, Google has the edge and frontend resources to absorb very large attacks, and DoSSec-SRE prowling around and adjusting the defenses around the clock. One of the reasons that cloud computing feels like feudalism is if you don't have the protection of an Amazon or a Google, you're pretty much screwed. Are your systems able to survive a billion packet-per-second botnet attack? https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/identifying-and-protecting-against-the-largest-ddos-attacks https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/ide...
- amelius 5y agoCurious. Did the larger feudal lords attack the smaller ones in the old days?
- throwaway81523 5y agoThe monarch's job was basically to prevent this.
- astral303 5y agoOmg not a good look … a commercial e-mail provider…. IMAP and web are down. Where is the failover? hugs best of luck to the ops team
- throwawayboise 5y agoAll of Facebook was down for hours a few weeks ago. Stuff happens.
- astral303 5y agoI don’t pay money to use Facebook..
- azinman2 5y agoI cannot imagine a single service you pay for that hasn’t had downtime in their past.
- ocdtrekkie 5y agoYou'd be stunned how awful Office 365's downtime is. Fastmail probably has a tenth of their downtime.
- marpstar 5y agoAdvertisers do.
- amelius 5y agoEverybody pays Facebook indirectly through advertisers.
- Gigachad 5y agoMeh, In my whole time using it, I have never noticed it down. Even today it seems to be up as I see it now and I did not notice any outage. Email is not a real time system I rely on anyway. As long as they don't lose my data or have it leaked, I don't really care if an email arrives an hour late once a year.
- 5y ago
- syntaxing 5y agoOut of curiosity, in situation like these, if you send an e-mail to someone with a Fastmail account, does it eventually get to them or will it bounce back?
- js2 5y agoSMTP servers queue messages and retry periodically. It’s an old and resilient protocol. Eventually the message will bounce, but it’s up to the sending SMTP server how long to retry before giving up. There are some guidelines here: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5321#section-4.5.4 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5321#section-4.5.4
- tharkun__ 5y agoShort answer: yes Long answer: it depends. On the settings on all the parties involved. Mail bounceds after the retry limits and timeouts are exhausted. Your provider tries 5 times over 24 hours? Then that's how long fastmail has to be unreachable by your provider. Maybe my provider reaches them via their secondary routes and thus there's zero chance of bouncing. Mail goes through right away. At least to their server. But maybe the recipient reached their servers via the attacked primary and thus can't see/fetch that email.
- azinman2 5y agoSMTP servers will keep retrying for a while.
- linux2647 5y agoI think the retry period is somewhere between 48 and 72 hours
- dataexporter 5y agoIt should eventually get to them. https://twitter.com/Samuel_SGS/status/1451380974776770565 https://twitter.com/Samuel_SGS/status/1451380974776770565
- MerelyMortal 5y ago
- steanne 5y agooh, i had that page bookmarked but didn't notice until now it has a feed too. subscribed.
- mac01021 5y agoSince Fastmail is the topic here: Have any other Fastmail users been finding lately that their messages have been getting flagged by recipients' spam filters more than before? I've been using Fastmail since January, but getting flagged as spam has only seemed to be a significant issue for me for the past couple of months.
- LinuxBender 5y agoI use FM for some of my domains and have recently seen Google/Gmail flagging some messages as spam. None of the other mail providers appear to be flagging FM messages that I have seen.
- GrayShade 5y agoIt's back up for me, status page doesn't say anything new, though.
- scottmcdot 5y agoStill down for me, although some Android notifications came through.
- BitAstronaut 5y agoStill down on this end.
- scottmcdot 5y agoBack for me now.
- scottmcdot 5y agoThis is especially worse for the Fastmail team in Melbourne that were likely going to the pub for the first time in a LONG time.
- capableweb 5y agoWithout any kind of context, why would this be the first time in a long time? Are they usually heavy drinkers but been on a sober-schedule that just been broken or something like that?
- mahkeiro 5y agoMelbourne is just out of a 260 days lockdown.
- davidbanham 5y agoNo, they’re coming out of a 78 day lockdown. They’ve had around 260 days of lockdown _in total_ since the start of the pandemic. That’s been spread across multiple intervals, though. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-03/melbourne-longest-lockdown/100510710 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-03/melbourne-longest-loc...
- Xylakant 5y agoMelbourne had one of the longest lockdowns world-wide and it just got lifted.
- MrWiffles 5y agoWell this explains a lot. Couldn’t access my email earlier and now I know why. Fuck the chicken shit little script kiddies causing a ddos right now, bunch’a fuckin children.
- maxekman 5y agoSending and receiving works from Sweden right now. Maybe there was a longer than usual delay, but hard to know.
- bolasanibk 5y agoSeems to work for me as well.(from US)
- divbzero 5y agoWorks for me as well from the US. ‘Primary’ might be the key word? Fastmail must have redundant networks for situations like this.
- garazy 5y agoCould this be linked to truthsocial.com ? https://builtwith.com/detailed/truthsocial.com https://builtwith.com/detailed/truthsocial.com
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hnbad 5y agoWhat are you suggesting? That Truth Social is seeing so much activity that its e-mail use is registered as an attack against Fastmail's ISP? That someone is attacking Truth Social by attacking their e-mail provider's ISP? Honestly this is the first time I've even heard of Truth Social and without context and with the utter lack of information provided by their landing page, it looks like yet another Gab-like. I don't see how someone would think they're worth attacking to the point where their e-mail provider's ISP is a useful vector.
- anang 5y agoDonald Trump is behind Truth, which could conceivably make it or it’s service providers targets.
- hnbad 5y agoDonald Trump is mostly politically irrelevant outside the GOP at this point. Certainly not relevant enough to warrant going to the lengths of attacking the service's e-mail provider's ISP to attack a service affiliated with him. That's an incredibly contrived but also resource-intensive attack with a very limited effect.
- bdd 5y agoDoes Fastmail actually have multiple providers? One of their mail exchangers, web site, SMTP, POP, and IMAP servers are all on the same /24, that belongs to NYI (AS11403) and according to the BGP table is not multihomed. Historical DNS records from last two years also show they weren't changed. I guess, "primary" is still a technically correct qualifier for the "sole" provider.
- jjeaff 5y agoPerhaps their primary provider handles their SMTP traffic and any additional providers handle things like the cdn.
- macns 5y ago"Services have been restored and we are investigating the underlying cause. No mail has been lost. Thanks for your patience." This was 3 hours ago, but I can't connect to the server. I'm receiving emails though.
- temptemptemp111 5y agoAnyone who denies the WEF "cyberpandemic" announced in 2020 is a conspiracy theorist!!! /s
- kyleee 5y agoInteresting, Runbox is under attack too apparently