Canonical Restores Websites After Second DDoS Attack This Year
Launchpad and the Snap Store kept working while Canonical's main websites came under sustained attack. It was the company's second DDoS incident this year.
The attack lasted 4 hours and 12 minutes, according to OMG! Ubuntu. Most affected services were accessible again by October 9, but the disruption still cut off users and developers looking for Ubuntu information.
The outage did not appear to reach Launchpad or the Snap Store. That made it narrower than the late-April attack, when both developer services went down and some users could not install Ubuntu updates.
During the October attack, Ubuntu PPAs, the CD image server and Ubuntu SSO also remained operational, alongside Launchpad and the Snap Store.
Which Canonical services were affected
Canonical confirmed the attack on October 8 in a post on the Ubuntu Discourse forum: "Canonical's websites are under a sustained distributed denial of service attack," it said, warning that some services might not be reachable at times. The company directed users to its status page for updates.
OMG! Ubuntu reported disruption to Canonical's primary web properties, including ubuntu.com and canonical.com. The Ubuntu blog and developer site were also affected, along with Ubuntu's security advisory pages and API. The publication timed the outage at 4 hours and 12 minutes and reported on October 10 that it had been resolved. Canonical's October 11 update said most affected services had been restored, while work on some components continued.
The disruption also affected access to Ubuntu websites and ISO downloads, according to a technical account. Canonical has not disclosed the attack's size or origin. Its updates included no confirmed claim of responsibility and no technical postmortem.
In its October 11 update, Canonical said most affected services had been restored, but work to recover individual components was still underway.
A second incident after a broader April attack
In late April, Canonical described a more disruptive incident as a "sustained, cross-border attack." Launchpad and the Snap Store were among the services taken down. Some users could not install Ubuntu updates. A hacktivist group calling itself The Islamic Cyber Resistance in Iraq - 313 Team claimed responsibility for that attack.
No information establishes a link between the April incident and the latest disruption. The October attack affected Canonical's primary websites, while the April incident also reached services used to distribute and develop Ubuntu software.
Canonical has not confirmed a link to the April attack or disclosed the latest attack's scale or origin.
