Zerigo falls victim to DDoS attackers

Cloud services provider Zerigo has lost at least one client after its DNS servers suffered a “sustained” distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

Problems with Zerigo’s servers were first noted on the company's Twitter feed at at 5.14am GMT on 23 July, with its European customers taking the brunt of the outage.

The issue was not resolved until 5.17am the following day, with the firm's UK servers among the last to be brought back online. To date, Zerigo has not said where the attack came from or given any indication as to motive.

In the wake of the outage, CloudBees, a Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider, announced on its blog that it would be leaving Zerigo.

“Our choice of DNS provider, Zerigo, was made a few years ago during a time when our infrastructure needs were different than today. Zerigo was a great choice at the time, and gave us easy scaled DNS with global capacity. However, today demonstrated some of the limitation to their infrastructure, and also to their public updates of status reports," said the blog post.

"While we have no doubts today's events will make Zerigo's DNS infrastructure even stronger, we feel it's time to move our DNS to a provider that has greater resources and capacity to handle large scale DDoS attacks.”

Jane McCallion is ITPro's Managing Editor, specializing in data centers and enterprise IT infrastructure. Before becoming Managing Editor, she held the role of Deputy Editor and, prior to that, Features Editor, managing a pool of freelance and internal writers, while continuing to specialize in enterprise IT infrastructure, and business strategy.

Prior to joining ITPro, Jane was a freelance business journalist writing as both Jane McCallion and Jane Bordenave for titles such as European CEO, World Finance, and Business Excellence Magazine.