Today Atlassian’s distributed code hosting service Bitbucket was subject to a distributed denial of service attack, taking down Bitbucket for almost an hour, with some impact on other Atlassian services and websites. Atlassian’s datacentre and network providers have blocked the attack and mitigated the impact to its customers. At the time of writing almost all Bitbucket customers are returned to full service, and efforts are continuing to restore full service for remaining customers.
A denial of service is a malicious attack intended to make services unavailable for use. Unfortunately denial of service attacks are common on the Internet, and a rite of passage for any popular service. Atlassian and its providers have defences in place to protect against denial of service attacks which allowed Atlassian to quickly reduce the impact and time of the attack. More updates will be posted on Atlassian’s blog and twitter account @atlassian as needed.
