Further Update on Ancestry.com Disrupted Services

Earlier this afternoon Ancestry.com issued a statement on its Facebook page explaining the lack of service situation that began around 1:30 p.m. MT (3:30 p.m. ET) on Monday. Besides stating that there may still be intermittent service outages as they bring all the servers backup, the statement contained a link to their official statement on their blog page (which is on their website). 

About 2:30 p.m. EDT, Ancestry.com released that blog post statement on its Facebook page after realizing if the website goes down their statement can not be accessed either.

For those who do not want to go to the Ancestry Facebook page, here is the company's statement:

Ancestry.com is back online. Please know 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.

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AN UPDATE FROM OUR CTO, SCOTT SORENSEN
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

At the time I wrote this post, Ancestry's website and its blog were down again. I advise patience as they work to completely resolve the situation.

See you soon at the Mt. Clemens Public Library!

LE