MOST CURRENT - 20 June 08 14.15 GMT:
Things seem to have stabilised as the corrected dns settings filtered out across the web. There are still a small number of users accessing the instructions on what to do to get onto Photobucket, of which some would be due to local caches.
So I guess it’s almost situation normal! Have a good weekend, and keep your images safe…
PREVIOUS UPDATE:
19 June 08, 22.15 GMT: There are still quite a few reports from all over the globe of Photobucket not working. Some users are reporting that they are still getting a holding page. The search volumes of people coming to this blog to try and resolve the problem have not diminished since yesterday.
It’s interesting that I can actually tell from the logs to this website users of which ISP’s still can’t access Photobucket.
For example, the article about what to do if you still don’t have access to Photobucket is frequented the most by users from two US ISPs:
Comcast (USA), and
Road Runner (USA)
I’m also getting visitors to this article from other places like:
Speedy Net (Peru)
AT&T/SBC (USA)
Centurytel (USA)
Wanadoo (Holland)
Planet (Holland)
Direct-adsl (Holland)
Bredbandsbolaget (Sweden)
SCRTC (USA)
Time Warner Telecom (USA)
Opticon (Hungary)
BCC Net (Delta, British Columbia, Canada)
Dodo (Australia)
== many others ==
But Comcast and Road Runner are miles ahead of everyone else in the numbers of users suffering from this problem. If you are their users - talk to them. Explain that they need to force a dns refresh.
Apparently the (alleged) Turkish hackers group used an account on the servers of Bulgarian Hosting company Zettahost, causing all affected Photobucket traffic to redirect to it. Zettahost took the hackers’ page down, and put up an explanation instead. And, indeed, some users are still reporting that they are getting the Zettahost page, when trying to access Photobucket.
Two things have compounded the problem:
a. Photobucket has not been posting any updates on their site, so users don’t know what’s going on. Their latest corporate blog entry is from June 12 and is entitled: “We’re the best photo sharing site, so vote for us!” The latest press release is from May 14th. As of now there is still no official information from Photobucket about the incident.
b. Although it was very thoughtful of Zettahost to put up an explanatory message on the website that users were redirected to (the website that users got instead of Photobucket), the message was obviously written by someone who is a non-native speaker of English. As a result of the awkward grammar, some users thought it couldn’t have been written by a real company, and that this was still a site controlled by hackers.
The message goes:
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IMPORTANT! Photobucket.com problem read here:
Last night Photobucket.com DNS at register.com was hacked by malicious people that are trying to compromise our business!
We are in no way affiliated with such bad deeds and cooperate with photobucket in capturing these individuals.
They have pointed the domain photobucket.com to an account hosted on our systems!
We have blocked that and photobucked techs have restored the domain pointing to its original location!
ALL account information and pictures on photobucket.com are OK, please have patience!
Unfortunately the complete DNS replication usually takes 24-48 hours and during this time caches DNS records might still point to us!
The normal operation of Photobucket is restored and as soon as the replication is complete there should be no further such issues!
We would like to emphasize that we are in now way responsible for what happens with photobucket and all users bumping across our systems!
We are a legitimate web hosting company operating since 2003 and in no way tolerate such hacking attempts!
If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us at abuse@zettahost.com!
Thanks for your patience and understanding!
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It looks like a waiting game now…
Bookmark this page or subscribe to the “That Danny!” blog to follow updates.
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MORE PHOTOBUCKET INFORMATION:
For the background to this story - go here.
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