April Linden blogs the weekend’s DDOS

Posted on by Inara Pey
Graph showing “normal” log-ins over the course of a day compared with Sunday, October 28th. Credit: April Linden

In my week #44/1 User Group update, I noted that April Linden had indicated the issues Second Life users experienced with the platform on Sunday, October 28th through Monday October 29th, 2018 were the result of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack.

April has now issued a blog post expanding on her original forum comments, with the full text of her post reading:

Hello amazing Residents of Second Life!

A few days ago (on Sunday, October 28th, 2018) we had a really rough day on the grid. For a few hours it was nearly impossible to be connected to Second Life at all, and this repeated several times during the day.

The reason this happened is that Second Life was being DDoSed.

Attacks of this type are pretty common. We’re able to handle nearly all of them without any Resident-visible impact to the grid, but the attacks on Sunday were particularly severe. The folks who were on call this weekend did their best to keep the grid stable during this time, and I’m grateful they did.

Sunday is our busiest day in Second Life each week, and we know there’s lot of events folks plan during it. We’re sorry those plans got interrupted. Like most of y’all, I too have an active life as a Resident, and my group had to work around the downtime as well. It was super frustrating.

As always, the place to stay informed of what’s going on is the Second Life Grid Status Blog. We do our best to keep it updated during periods of trouble on the grid.

Thanks for listening. I’ll see you in-world!

April Linden
Second Life Operations Team Lead

Shug Maitland kept an eye on the ups and downs of log-ins during the DDOS attack via https://etitsup.com/slstats/ through Sunday, October 28th, 2018 and into the early hours of Monday, October 29th, sending me the above screen capture

There not a lot more that can be added – DDOS attacks are an unfortunate fact of life, and while the Lab has learned to try to deal with them without impacting the normal flow of activities for Second Life users, it’s also unfortunate that at time this cannot always be the case.

Thanks once again to April for the update on the situation.

Published by Inara Pey

Eclectic virtual world blogger with a focus on Second Life, VR, virtual environments and technology.

6 thoughts on “April Linden blogs the weekend’s DDOS”

  1. I just got frozen off and could log back in the same way I did Sunday. I hope its not starting again.

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  3. as a side note, SL is not the only thing that is being hit. BDO has been hit several times in the last week as well, and then there’s that article on heise talking about some security researcher finding a websie where you can “rent” a bot net for this kind of crap for as low as 20$ for a 15 minute ddos 0.o

    https://www.heise.de/security/artikel/Wie-einfach-sogar-Noobs-DDoS-Attacken-ausfuehren-koennen-4206303.html (in german, link to english source in the article)

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  4. I’m a dance hostess that keeps the chatter flowing and such. Spent 500L on my costume for Halloween and got thrown off 4 times just during the set. I lost approximately 2000L to the attacks and threw a mini diva tantrum under my hostess act. The DJ didn’t hide his rage though. Lol

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