BigBase · Service notice

Important security update

A serious security issue has been reported in PHP, software used by many websites.

As a precaution, we have temporarily taken most servers and websites that may be affected offline. Your website or another service may therefore be unavailable at the moment. We are working on a safe solution and will apply the necessary updates as soon as possible.
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Nameserver problems

Nameserver problems

Problems with our nameservers began on 22 July 2022 at approximately 09:30. A DDoS attack was detected, and all nameservers were unavailable until 11:12. The same thing happened later that day between 12:41 and 14:17.

During these periods, many websites we managed were unreachable. Email delivery was also affected, causing delays in some cases. Below are answers to questions you may have about the outage.

What is a nameserver?

A nameserver is a computer that records where websites can be found on the internet. For example:

  1. A visitor opens www.bigbase.nl.
  2. Their computer asks a nameserver where the website is located.
  3. The nameserver replies with the address of the server hosting it, for example a server in Amsterdam.
  4. The visitor’s computer retrieves the BigBase website from that server.

This exchange can take less than 50 milliseconds, so the visitor does not notice it. If the nameserver is unavailable, the computer may be unable to find the website and retrieve it.

What is a DDoS attack?

An attack sends enormous numbers of requests to a nameserver in a short time. Suppose a server can answer 100,000 requests per second and normally receives 5,000. If it instead receives 200,000 per second for several minutes, it may be unable to keep up and become unavailable.

Such sustained traffic does not occur in normal circumstances. Deliberately overwhelming a service in this way is called a DDoS attack. Its direct effect is on availability rather than changing website content or stored data.

What has improved?

We have made changes using specialist software to ignore requests associated with this type of attack. Nevertheless, protection cannot guarantee that every attack will be prevented. Even a system prepared for 100 million requests may face an attack twice that size. Attacks can be relatively easy to launch, while their direct effect is to disrupt service availability.

What else can we do?

This was the first such nameserver attack in twenty years. We therefore decided not to announce sweeping changes immediately, as we did not expect another incident soon.

We nevertheless offered every customer a free move to Cloudflare’s nameservers as quickly as possible. Cloudflare can also experience problems, so this is not a guarantee against every outage. The original article referred to TechCrunch’s report of a Cloudflare outage.

Changing nameservers does not negatively affect your email or website when carried out correctly. If you would like to arrange it, contact us.

Update, 4 October 2022: Following another nameserver problem, we decided to move to Cloudflare as quickly as possible.

Update, 10 October 2022: All domains have now been moved to the new nameservers.