The Shard and forums are currently offline. This forum has been set up temporarily to provide information on our current status. This board will be deleted or archived for posterity once we are back online.
We, and many other UO free shards were hit with a
DDOS attack last which is ongoing.
Due to the severe nature of the attack, our host has "null routed" our IP address pending reprovisioning.
If this sounds like a bunch of jibberish, the bottom line is, we will be back.
Our IRC channel (whose network was also under attack last night) is still online, you can connect your IRC client to: steeltown.uk.eu.wildirc.net channel #secondage
irc://steeltown.uk.eu.wildirc.net/secondage if you have mIRC
There has been no loss of data due to this attack, we will be back online as soon as we are able and without any loss of data save a possible 20 minute revert to our last save, as likely many characters died when the network went offline.
This situation is something we were relatively ill prepared for and while we intend to be better equipped to mitigate attacks like this in the future, it is virtually impossible to prevent an attack of this scale.
The primary focus at this time is mitigation of future vulnerabilty and preservation of our data, both shard and forums. We will not be able to bring the shard back online until the threat of a future attack is minimized. We are currently working with the host to improve our ability to deal with attacks of this type in the future, and to get us back online.
Because of the nature of this issue there will likely not be further updates until the above conditions are met.