We're seeing an ongoing attack against our primary network provider
fastmailstatus.com
fastmailstatus.com
One of their mail exchangers, web site, SMTP, POP, and IMAP servers are all on the same /24, that belongs to NYI (AS11403) and according to the BGP table is not multihomed.
Historical DNS records from last two years also show they weren't changed.
I guess, "primary" is still a technically correct qualifier for the "sole" provider.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-03/melbourne-longest-loc...
your speculation rests on the idea that they are incredibly stupid not to think of using the redundancy they built in.
Long answer: it depends. On the settings on all the parties involved. Mail bounceds after the retry limits and timeouts are exhausted.
Your provider tries 5 times over 24 hours? Then that's how long fastmail has to be unreachable by your provider. Maybe my provider reaches them via their secondary routes and thus there's zero chance of bouncing. Mail goes through right away. At least to their server. But maybe the recipient reached their servers via the attacked primary and thus can't see/fetch that email.
Now that the attack is over, I can open the app and read those emails.
That Truth Social is seeing so much activity that its e-mail use is registered as an attack against Fastmail's ISP?
That someone is attacking Truth Social by attacking their e-mail provider's ISP?
Honestly this is the first time I've even heard of Truth Social and without context and with the utter lack of information provided by their landing page, it looks like yet another Gab-like. I don't see how someone would think they're worth attacking to the point where their e-mail provider's ISP is a useful vector.
> We're seeing an ongoing attack against our primary network provider. We're working with them to block the attack and restore access.
From that thread 9 months ago, who goes on to complain about not having post mortems sent to him via Twitter.
I've been using Fastmail since 2014 and can't remember a time I couldn't log in and access my email. I'm sure the service has gone down in the past 7 years, but I can't tell any difference from Fastmail's uptime vs Microsoft's for Outlook 365 and Google's for GMail.
I just read some emails before opening HN and seeing this, in fact. Their caching works well enough that I didn't even know they were down. Now it's showing that it can't connect to the server. Well done, Team Fastmail--that's pretty slick.
One of my annoyances with their iOS app is it doesn't support offline mode which is fairly annoying...
> We're seeing an ongoing attack against our primary network provider. We're working with them to block the attack and restore access.
This was 3 hours ago, but I can't connect to the server. I'm receiving emails though.
hugs best of luck to the ops team
nothing has 100% uptime, and you sure do not want to pay for something to try
nobody is so important that they can’t handle a little downtime now and then
Have any other Fastmail users been finding lately that their messages have been getting flagged by recipients' spam filters more than before?
I've been using Fastmail since January, but getting flagged as spam has only seemed to be a significant issue for me for the past couple of months.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/ide...
I am giving a presentation in a few mins and Bob was supposed to email me the updated price sheet?
I am running a facilities desk and my team gets assignments via email from the ticketing system?
I forgot the name of my hotel in Prague, but it's OK I'll show my taxi driver the email confirmation.
Like I said, you literally can't imagine a case where someone relies on their email to either be notified of something urgent, look up something urgent, or simply as part of their "what do I do next" workflow?
I think all the examples above have workarounds (ie, dependency on email is avoidable) but that's a different question.
I ran you through a bunch of cases where you need information from your email urgently and there are painful consequences when you don't get it. Do you see how each one of these cases involves a painful loss of money/productivity/time? Can you visualize how someone can blow a multi-million dollar sales presentation because a key piece of data doesn't reach them in time? Do you consider that acceptable risk?
Are you able to understand that the problem isn't "an hour of downtime a year" but the risk of that hour happening at a time that absolutely fucks you over?
It's like saying "who cares if there's an hour a year that my car doesn't work?" It doesn't sound important except if that hour happens to be when you are getting your wife to the hospital to give birth, or when you're on your way to the airport for a flight you need to make, or if you're driving through the desert and breaking down for an hour is terrifying.
Quite the opposite, I have worked a long time very closely with reliability and have done no small amount of time studying failure. Everything fails sometimes, there are always unknowns that aren't accounted for.
>It's like saying "who cares if there's an hour a year that my car doesn't work?"
This is often the case? Oh no, you have a flat tire, a dead battery, or whatever. It's not world ending, get to your destination another way or reschedule.
>Can you visualize how someone can blow a multi-million dollar sales presentation because a key piece of data doesn't reach them in time? Do you consider that acceptable risk?
If millions of dollars are on the line and you can't figure out how to work around a simple communications issue, you deserve to lose the deal. Not being able to handle failure or insisting on 100% uptime for dependencies is a sign that you have no idea how to handle risk.
My son was able to book the last 2 seats on a Southwest flight so we only lost a day of a $500/night AirBnB. Luckily, my son uses gmail so we got the confirmation w/ a check-in link OK. We lost our car rental reservation because Alaska's idea of a replacement reservation arrived 32 hours later and Budget only holds for 24 hours. Even the SWA was 26 hours later, but somehow Priceline + Thrifty found a car.
So a shitshow could have been even worse if the 2nd outage had started earlier & my kid had taken my advice to de-google. My sister & parents also use Fastmail due to my advice, but aren't as dependent on timely email.
One thing that did save me is that I brought a notebook which has all my old email. Almost left it behind, but it's 2.8 lb & 1.61 cm thick. Smartphones still have their limits....