At around 19:15 UTC on December 1, 2014, our DNS service provider started receiving a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.
The attack was volumetric, and lasted 13 hours.
DDoS overwhelms a server's capacity to respond to requests,
so that other legitimate requests are left unanswered.
In this scenario, DNS queries for our services at
*.travis-ci.org and *.travis-ci.com timed out,
rendering our services unreachable for the most part.
During the past service interruptions, we posted updates on
http://status.travis-ci.com, and this incident was
no different.
However, this service was also unreachable for the same reason
that our services were unreachable.
Because of this, our communication with our users was limited
to updates on Twitter.
This was a particularly prolonged DDoS attack. Our fantastic DNS provider DNSimple fought against this malicious attack valiantly. You can read their postmortem here.
We have set up a new domain, traviscistatus.com to communicate the status of our services. This domain is served by a different DNS provider.
We are investigating a secondary DNS provider, which will allow for a better failover in cases where the primary is unavailable.
If you have further questions, please feel free to get in touch with us via email.