Ancestry.com attacked, down for several hours

Ancestry.com attacked, down for several hours

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SALT LAKE CITY — Ancestry.com has experienced outages and site failures after being attacked Monday.

The genealogy site was offline for much of Tuesday after a Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS) crashed the site, as well as Find A Grave — a sister site of Ancestry.com.

Starting Monday afternoon, attackers fooled the websites into thinking there was an inordinate amount of traffic flooding the sites, which crashed their servers.

“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,” chief technology officer Scott Sorensen said in a news release. “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.”

Sorensen stressed that no data was compromised or mined by the attackers.

According to Twitter, Ancestry.com went on and off line several times Tuesday as repairs were being attempted in the midst of the attack. Sorensen said Ancestry.com's Web operations team is working to prevent similar attacks from happening in the future.

As of 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, the site was not functioning. The ongoing problem will continue to be addressed by Ancestry.com, with updates posted on its Facebook and Twitter pages.

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