DDOS to blame for problems during auction yesterday.
Sedo’s outage during the .de domain name auction yesterday was not due to intense bidding activity, but was actually a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack, reports the company.
In a statement released today, Sedo wrote:
Due to a malicious attempt to disrupt our services, Sedo suffered from two different distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks which temporarily caused the Sedo and GreatDomains.com websites to be slow or irresponsive between 17:55 and 20:15 CET on October, 22nd 2009 (11:55 and 2:15 PM EDT). Together with its protection provider, Sedo successfully fought both attacks and our websites are again fully operational. While the GreatDomains auction has concluded, to provide equal opportunities for all parties interested of the 1, 2 & 3-Character .de Pre-Auction, Sedo has extended the auction and attempted to contact and notify all bidders of the extended schedule.
Yesterday Sedo’s message on its web site during the outage and in tweets suggested that the downtime was due to intense bidding activity for .de domain names. Although bidding was indeed intense, there appears to have been more at play.
andy kelly says
Is it possible that sedo have exaggerated this ddos attack or invented it? Afterall if the response to the .de auction was poor its the perfect excuse to re run it.
Maybe I’m totally wrong but you never know.
Andrew Allemann says
Andy – I doubt it. With all the hoopla and competition around DENIC disorganized release of these domains, the explanation makes sense.
Domain Investor says
Major corporations know that if they lie about an attack as a ploy to get more revenue, it would eventually come out.
They wouldn’t do it.
I wonder if the top bidder just minutes before the ddos attack was the person that paid for the attack?
Craig says
I was one of the October Great Domains sellers, I had 6 premium .com domains in the auction etc.
No, our auctions that ended at the exact same time as the .DE auction were not extended.
Sedo management continues to be mum on how they plan to handle this fiasco.
Andrew Allemann says
Craig – did the auctions that ended at noon receive a bid in the last five minutes? If not, then they wouldn’t have been extended.
Craig says
I am sorry for not being more clear.
I meant extended due to the site crash like the .DE auctions.
Basically, the consensus is that a decent percentage of bidders were unable to participate in the October Great Domains auction due to this site issue.
Unlike the .DE auction that got preferential treatment and was extended by Sedo once their site was up and running, the seller of the Great Domains have been SOL.
I personally wasn’t able to access Sedo for the last minutes before my auction ended.
Andrew Allemann says
Craig – Sedo says it received bids in the final minutes. It sounds like you’re saying that some people weren’t able to access it and place bids while others were not?
Craig says
That is absolutely correct. There are threads on both DNForum as wells as NamePros documenting this. I myself was unable to access Sedo.com within the last 4 minutes of my auctions.
As is common, seasoned bidders will wait until the very end to bid so as to avoid driving the price up early on.
domains says
sedo are:
a/ lying
b/ incompetent beyond belief and dont really know
i’ll go with a/
heres what they said earlier in the day:
“Due to the extremely high participation in the .De Pre-Auction Sedo?s website was temporarily down. We have decided to extend the auction until 8:00 PM CET. If necessary we will extend the auction later than this time to accommodate additional bids.”
so, it was just lots of traffic, then dos attack?
yeah right. lying german twats
they got roasted legally by many parties over the .mobi auction debacle and had to eat humble pie and retreat back into the bunkers. i predict after ‘they’ (sedo), win some of the top ones, they will be hit by suits, of the legal variety
personally, i cant wait. sholud be fun lol
Andrew Allemann says
@ domains – as is often the case in a DDOS attack, I think their initial reaction was that it was heavy bidding…it wasn’t until shortly thereafter that they realized it was a DDOS. I can’t tell you what was going through their minds at the time. Probably first thing was to get the site back up.
Not taking sides here, just trying to point out possibilities…
Domain Investor says
I was not able to access Sedo at the end of the Great Domains auction.
domains says
Hi Andrew,
yes thats fair comment. Its just that sedo said the same thing after .mobi auction, after they said the heavy bidding melted their servers, figuratively speaking of course lol
thing is, a dman sight more people will have been bidding on the thousands of .de domain and the great domains that in the .mobi bidding war
they got in enough hot water and legal action that time, to make the same mistake again would mean they are in the sh1t
of course they are, on quite a few fronts.
especially as they have been warned time and time again not to end at the same time. they dont have a leg to stand on. of course as we all know when agreements are unfairly worded etc theyre not worth the paper theyre written on, look whats happeneing to the banks , in the UK, from class actions etc
this wasnt a ddos attack. i just know it
maybe they will open up their logs to the legal boys, they’ll tell them
pass the popcorn……………lol
AR says
I was going to bid on 3 different domains up to $5,000 but could not access the site about 20 minutes prior to the auction ending. I actually saw that error page saying the auction would be extended until 8 due to technical issues. I checked back a few hours later thinking I could still bid – based on the notice I saw when they were having issues. When I came back a few hours later all auctions had already ended. I do realize the confusion and I thought it said EST, but as mentioned above it was CET which in the US meant their downtime caused confused and we did not bid on domains we wanted. We were ready to bid within 10 minutes of the auctions scheduled end time.
So there are at least 3 domains that sold without our bids. Domain sellers were hurt by this downtime. Is there any way to see what prices the domains actually sold for after the auctions have closed?
Richard Wixom says
“Is there any way to see what prices the domains actually sold for after the auctions have closed?”
AR, see my site link for that information.
Adam says
poor planning. bummer for anyone with names in the GD auction
AR says
Bummer for buyers too!
Craig says
Mr. Andrew Allemann,
I can show you proof that none of my 7 (4 October Great Domains auctions and 3 Sedo brokered auctions that ended at the exact same time) auctions received bids after 11:56 AM EST.
I can send you screenshots or actual links to the ended auction pages.
The October Great Domains auction should have been extended due to site failure just like the .DE auction!! Sedo has done a great injustice to their sellers.
Andrew Allemann says
Craig – I don’t doubt that you didn’t receive any bids after 11:56…
Craig says
Hi Again Andrew,
Based on all of the information you have reviewed over on DNForum & NamePros, would you please write another post addressing this outstanding October GreatDomains issue?