Quote:
Sunday, February 22, 2004
Over the past few days, we have been receiving a very large sustained ongoing DDoS attack against all of the servers on our IRC network. While we have made efforts to filter the attack, the person behind it has been very persistent and we have been forced to block all traffic to the servers at times to filter it. Unfortunately, the end result has been an unusable network and the loss of our secondary server.
Together with our main server provider, we have decided to close down what's left of the IRC network. We don't know for how long the attack will continue, and it has, at times, affected other servers (and paying customers) on the networks where the IRC servers are hosted. Ultimately, we decided that it's no longer worth the expense, resources, and trouble to deal with any more attacks and outages over a free service. While we understand how many of you have come to depend on the IRC network, we hope you can understand our position and do apologize for the short notice and inconvenience this causes. We would have liked to continue the IRC network for a long time to come, but with the current state of DDoS attacks on the Internet and the problem only increasing, this no longer seems feasible.
We would like to thank the providers who hosted our servers over the past few years for their support, and all of you who made the IRC network your home. At this time, we know who is responsible for the attacks and law enforcement is investigating. Should you have any information which might assist law enforcement, please send it to us and we will pass it along.
