Meetup’s Multi-Day Outage Was Due To A Newer, More Powerful Type Of DDoS Attack

A bit of follow-up on Meetup’s DDoS (denial of service) attack which saw the company’s website and accompanying mobile services down for several days: according to the company, this was an example of the increasingly common NTP-based DDoS attack. Explains CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince, who stepped in to help Meetup get back online, NTP-style attacks are a newer choice among criminals when it comes to producing the DDoS flood that can crash websites, and they’re far more powerful, too.

In a nutshell, DDoS attacks attempt to crash servers, usually web servers, by sending a barrage of traffic to overwhelm the receiving ports. The servers crash under the load, taking websites and services down with them. In the past, such as with the high-profile Spamhaus DDoS attacks last year, the previous favorite vector for criminals instigating these attacks was DNS – that is, they would amplify their attacks using the DNS infrastructure.

But now, attackers are beginning to exploit flaws in other, older Internet protocols that were not originally secured particularly well. In Meetup’s case, the attackers use the NTP – or Network Time Protocol – which is a protocol that’s use to sync time clocks between multiple servers.

“The size of the attack was large enough that just about any organization, short of Google or someone with a network like CloudFlare, would have struggled to stay online,” explains Prince. “

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Gmail and other Google services go down (update 2: outage details)

and a host of other Google services have gone down or otherwise broken. The company's status board doesn't show any issues, but Gmail users are seeing notices that their accounts are "temporarily unavailable." We're reaching out to Google and will let you know if there are any updates.

Update: That was quick; Gmail, Google

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Aereo Apologizes To Customers Affected By Service Outage During Golden Globes

Aereo, the streaming TV startup backed by media mogul Barry Diller, has apologized for a brief service outage tonight. The outage only lasted about an hour, but was especially unfortunate because it coincided with the Golden Globes.

“Aereo experienced a partial outage in New York City tonight, which impacted a small group of users who were unable to access their accounts. Our engineers have worked to resolve the issue. We are truly sorry for the inconvenience and encourage any Aereo members impacted by the outage to reach out to support

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Netflix outage interrupts streaming in US, Canada and Latin America (update: fixed!)

As they do each year, the holidays have brought their usual assortment of family gatherings, overeating and service outages, including one tonight affecting Netflix. We're able to play videos on some of our devices but not others, and users are flooding Twitter with reports that it's out. The official support account tweeted that it's aware of streaming issues on "all devices" throughout the US, Canada and Latin America. There's no word on when service will be restored, but while we keep an eye on

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Yahoo CEO Mayer Apologizes For Mail Outage That She Says Affected 1% Of Users

After a week of Yahoo Mail outages that began four days ago, CEO Marissa Mayer has posted an apology to the company Tumblr. In it, she gives some details about the issue, which was apparently related to a hardware failure — and says that the issue affected 1% of Mail users.

“For many of us, Yahoo Mail is a lifeline to our friends, family members and customers,” reads Mayer’s apology. “This week, we experienced a major outage that not only interrupted that connection, but caused many of you a massive inconvenience — that’s unacceptable and it’s something we’re taking very seriously. “

The issue began on December 9th late in the evening, when a hardware outage alerted the engineering team to an issue with storage that served 1% of Yahoo’s users. The issue, says Mayer, was a ‘particularly rare’ one. Mayer also notes that a confusing ‘scheduled maintenance’ error which some users had seen during the emergency was in error.

Mayer says that, as of this afternoon, Yahoo has restored access to ‘almost everyone’ and delivered the queue of messages that was held up from being delivered. IMAP access has not been completely restored, nor has the complete inbox states of users with folders and ‘star’ statuses. So if you log in to your inbox and see that stuff still missing, it’s theoretically coming. Yahoo says it will be reaching out to individual users on the status of their inboxes.

“Above all else, we’re going to be working hard on improvements to prevent issues like this in the future. While our overall uptime is well above 99.9%, even accounting for this incident, we really let you down this week,” Mayer’s note concludes. “We can, and we will, do better in the future.”

The outage began suddenly and has gone on for an extremely long period of time, especially for a critical service like email. We reported on the issues on Wednesday, noting that the issues were affecting small business owners.

“Yahoo is so overwhelmed they cannot answer phone calls or reply to emails,” one user told TechCrunch. “I’ve been on hold for hours and hours since last Sunday, spoke twice to a real person who in both instances sent me to another number that is absolutely unreachable.”

“They have shut down the websites of countless businesses. The last person I talked with

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