At approximately 3:49pm central time on 8/1/2010 our upstream network provider experienced a complete network outage, causing all inbound and outbound traffic to our network to be rejected. This outage lasted until approximately 5:05pm central time, at which time it appears that network services have been fully restored.

We are waiting on a report from our provider as to the causes and resolution of the issue. We will update this blog post once we receive more information.

During this outage mail would have queued on the sender’s mail server and would not be lost. It may be delayed due to the sender’s retry timing policies.

We have issued a 5% service credit to all of our customers based on our uptime guarantee.

UPDATE: The following is the RFO (Reason for Outage) provided to us by our upstream provider:

A carefully crafted Denial of Service attack was launched at a customer and several of our routers, which caused the routers to repeatedly drop IGP (internal) and BGP (external) routing protocols. We identified the attack and found that it exploited a loophole in the control-plane policer packet matching logic which normally protects against these types of attacks, allowing it to slip past these filters and cause the amount of impact that it did.

As a work-around we have applied additional packet filters at multiple network edges to block this type of traffic, and are working with our router vendor to address the root cause of the issue, but we believe that this attack has been successfully filtered and that the network should be stable going forward.

The Purity Networks team had a great time at HostingCon 2010 in Austin, TX. It was great to see some of our customers and meet some new people in the hosted services industry too!

Congratulations to John Brancela of Infinitie Networks — he was the winner of the Xbox 360 250GB that we gave away at the show!

There were some great parties at the show, too! Thank you to all the vendors who hosted them.  The shot below is from the cPanel party on Tuesday night.

Beta Program Update

First, thank you to everyone who contacted us about beta testing our new scanning engine. We haven’t forgotten you! Due to travel for HostingCon, we’re a little bit behind schedule, but never fear! We’re still working hard on getting the new engine in place. We hope to be ready to go with the beta in the next couple of weeks. We have the new engine up and running (it works great, by the way!) and we’re just finishing the integration with the Account Manager and reporting.

Talk to you all soon!

Mailfoundry engineers have temporarily taken the G1 gateway offline as they investigate an issue causing some mail to get stuck in queue.  We expect services to be restored shortly but currently do not have an ETA.  At this time mail will queue on the sending server and will be delivered after G1 comes back online and the sender retries.

Update: G1 is back up and performing normally.

The staff here at Purity Networks would like to wish all Americans a Happy Independence Day!  We hope you have had safe and happy 4th of July celebrations!

We’re also happy to announce that we will be starting beta testing of our new antispam engine in about a week!  We’re looking for beta testers, so if you’re interested, please contact support@purity.net and let us know!  We’ve been testing it on our own domains for a few weeks now and it’s looking great!

We recently enabled a process that notifies our customers when they have domains that are not properly rejecting unknown users (catch-all alias enabled or domain simply misconfigured).  Please note that although the notice says that you have 24 hours to fix the issue, we will not begin disabling domains for this issue until June 2, 2010.  This will allow people time to get the issue corrected.

Please work with our support team if you have any questions or issues as to why you are receiving these notifications.

As a Silver Sponsor, we’d like to invite you to join us at HostingCon 2010, the premier conference and trade show for the hosted services industry. The best and brightest from the industry will be in attendance to learn about the latest news, ideas and technology affecting their businesses. Whether you are showcasing your new services, or you are simply checking the pulse of the industry, this is your opportunity to meet and network with your business partners, in a fun and educational atmosphere.

HostingCon is celebrating its Sixth Anniversary, and with a projected attendance of over 1,500 Internet professionals from over 30 countries, the 2010 show promises to be the best yet. We’re looking forward to meeting you in Austin, Texas!

To receive a discount on your registration for HostingCon 2010, use the discount code Purity2010. We hope to see you there!