As I write this, I am personally unable to log into Second Life from California, and to judge by reports and screencaps like the one above, many SLers around the world are also still having problems. The problems started yesterday and were acknowledged by Linden Lab at 1:30pm, and there's been about a dozen updates since then, an unscheduled maintenance here, a rolling restart there, and three hours ago, this message once again repeated, for the fifth time: "Investigating: We are aware that there may be intermittent issues with Second Life logins at this time."
Normally I don't report SL outages as they're usually resolved rapidly, but this is starting to seem like a fairly major downtime. I'm checking with Linden Lab for an update, and meantime, follow the SL Grid Status feed for updates.
Update, 11:00am: April Linden, the company's operation lead, reports that it's a DDOS, and suggests it's part of a broader attack other companies are also experiencing in North America, Western Europe, and Asia:
The grid is currently undergoing a large DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. Second Life being hit with a DDoS attack is pretty routine. It happens quite a bit, and we’re good at handling it without a large number of Residents noticing. However, the current DDoS attacks are at a level that we rarely see, and are impacting the entire grid at once.
My team (the Second Life Operations Team) is working as hard as we can to mitigate these attacks. We’ve had people working round-the-clock since they started, and will continue to do so until they settle down. (I had a very late night, myself!)
Second Life is not the only Internet service that’s been targeted today. My sister and brother opsen at other companies across the country are fighting the same battle we are. It’s been a rough few days on much of the Internet.
maybe they should have not laid off those 12 people and moved to shorter hours on support... bad mojo...
Posted by: Ilsa Hesse | Tuesday, February 27, 2018 at 10:58 AM
Looks like a major DDoS attack. For what idiotic reason ever.
Posted by: Vivienne | Tuesday, February 27, 2018 at 11:13 AM
It's strange that, if it is much wider, that there is little in the news about it. Perhaps I am searching for the wrong thing but, the other day, if I did "shooting Florida" (ok, perhaps it is more major) I would get many hits even though the news was just coming out yet I get nothing searching for "DDos attacks." I got here from the only link when I added "second life many today" to the string. Obviously it isn't too newsworthy ;)
Posted by: Jeremy Dyde | Tuesday, February 27, 2018 at 11:56 AM
InWorldz is hit badly, too.
Posted by: Vivienne | Tuesday, February 27, 2018 at 12:13 PM
Having worked in multi media companies for over 15 years, I think only having to lay off a dozen people is seriously not bad, the very last time I was laid off I was one of 200 just in my state. My company was in more than half of the United States. I know how all these people feel and the last thing that I was going to do was a DDOS attack. Facebook is not even fun anymore, it's the same post over and over again, I can't get on to Second Life. Is anybody else having problems. I even saw one posting asking how long the VR had to be down in order for them to get compensation for their lost income. Holy crap. I don't know if these people do not own Netflix or maybe a game on their phone but maybe they should invest in one. I can honestly tell you that Linden Labs does not want everyone pissed off. I feel for all the IT people working their ass off trying to figure out where these are coming from, normally they are easy to take care of and reroute but apparently along with technology, the attacks are getting more complicated. Welcome to real life
Posted by: Neutral | Tuesday, February 27, 2018 at 12:33 PM
Not surprising. SL has been a major farce for various and obvious reason. Time to move on to better things.
Posted by: Anon | Tuesday, February 27, 2018 at 05:14 PM
We are hit to. Nothing works. Getting more coffee. Reading a book while it blows over.
Posted by: cyberserenity | Wednesday, February 28, 2018 at 01:07 AM
Second Life has got to go.
Like Anon said, Second Life has been a major fail to begin with.
Posted by: Mark | Wednesday, February 28, 2018 at 10:39 PM
Such a pity attackers don't know how to use all their tech-savvy to do anything constructive. What a waste of intelligence.
Posted by: AJ | Tuesday, March 06, 2018 at 07:01 PM