Sites Go Down 16 Jun - Ancestry/Rootsweb & Find A Grave

Due to DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack...today 20 Jun is Day 5, with issues continuing for users of FTM.  During this same week Facebook also took a dive and crashed...19 Jun Users lost access to their stored pictures, messages and contact details as they were greeted with the message: "Sorry, something went wrong"

Ancestry.com

June 16

We are currently experiencing some problems with the website. We appreciate your patience as we work to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. 

UPDATE (3:15pm PST): Our team is still working on this issue that is affecting all of our sites. We will update you when we have more news to share.

UPDATE (4:27pm PST): The service remains unavailable - but please know we are focused on resolving the issue at hand.

UPDATE (5:55pm PST): We are still working on it.

UPDATE (8:05 pm PST): The web service remains unavailable at this time. 

UPDATE (9:40pm PST): Thank you again for your patience - we know how difficult this has been. The site is back online

Ancestry.com

June 17 

Around 1:30 p.m. MT on Monday, June 16, 2014, attackers targeted Ancestry with a Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS). During the attack, Ancestry websites along with the Find A Grave website were clogged with massive amounts of bogus traffic that took the sites down.

We want to apologize for the inconvenience this has caused and also thank you for your amazing support, as this may have interrupted some of your family history research. We understand how frustrating this can be for our customers, and please know that it was just as frustrating for us too. We appreciate your patience and support as we dealt with this unfortunate incident against Ancestry.

We have since neutralized the DDoS attack and our services have been up since 11:00 a.m. MT today. You should now be able to access all Ancestry and Find A Grave websites, though you may experience issues intermittently as we continue to work through bringing the sites back up to full capacity.

Your data was not compromised by this attack. This attack overloaded our servers with massive amounts of traffic but did not impact or access the data within those servers. No data was impacted in any way.

I would like to thank the Ancestry Web Operations team for working really hard throughout the night to restore the Ancestry and Find A Grave services and build the defenses necessary to mitigate future attacks of this sort. Our Web Operations team is closely monitoring the situation in case the attacks resume and we’re doing everything in our power to protect our websites from situations like this in the future.

Thank you.

Scott Sorensen
Chief Technology Officer

Ancestry.com

June 18

If you are using Family Tree Maker (FTM), we recommend switching to manual sync until the service is fully restored. 

On the top right, click the sync icon, you will see the options there. This should resolve any instabilities related to it trying to sync with the online trees.

Ancestry.com

Yesterday  - 19 Jun