Labor Sync Service Disruption and Restoration

In an effort to be transparent, we would like to discuss the nature and resolution of the December 1st, 2014 service disruption experienced by some of our customers.

What Happened

Our Domain Name System (DNS) provider was the target of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. This specific attack overwhelms the service with illegitimate requests for information indistinguishable from legitimate requests, making it very difficult to block the attackers.

The affected service translates our web address, laborsync.com, to point to our cloud. As a result, Labor Sync services were intermittently unavailable for some customers. Our service was never under direct attack and Labor Sync never went down, though it may have been temporarily unavailable.

While the affected service provider took measures to mitigate the effects of the attack throughout the day, we took action immediately to stabilize our availability by migrating DNS to another, unaffected provider. This change took a bit of time to propagate so results may not have been seen right away.

Depiction of real DDoS attack origins and targets

Depiction of real DDoS attack origins and targets

Moving Forward

We pride ourselves on providing high availability, high quality service for our customers. Engineering multiple redundancies into our service gave us 99.999657% availability over the last year. Though we have our own DDoS mitigation measures in place, the redundancies that this DNS provider had were not enough.

We are now working with multiple providers, each with their own redundancies, to increase our availability should one of our providers be attacked in the future. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience and are actively working to prevent this issue from affecting us and our customers in the future.