downtime

UPDATE: DOAJ’s site performance issues have now been solved

We are happy to inform that our site is now back to normal and our services have resumed. We are still working on a long-term stability strategy and we will be able to update you on that and also provide a more detailed explanation of our issues soon. Thank you again for your patience over the last few weeks.

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We deeply regret the current problems with the DOAJ site.  After much investigation and active measures, we can state that the DOAJ is effectively under attack from an unknown third party.

We have deployed a number of counter-measures to halt this attack, but with limited success, and are therefore forced to take even more extreme measures to attempt to mitigate this.  We hope that this will work but we cannot predict the outcome at this stage.

The DOAJ team would like to apologise for the intermittent service and to let you know we are doing our best to go back to normal operations.

Extended downtime – Wed 21st March 2018

DOAJ will be offline for approximately 8.5 hours from 12.50-21.10 UTC, or 12.50 to 21.10 GMT on Wednesday 21st March 2018.
DOAJ will experience an extended period of downtime on Wednesday 21st March 2018 while our hosting service, Digital Ocean, installs some important security fixes:
On January 4, 2018, multiple vulnerabilities in the design of modern CPUs were disclosed. Taking advantage of certain processor performance optimizations, these vulnerabilities—named Meltdown and Spectre—make it possible for attackers to coerce applications into revealing the contents of system and application memory when manipulated correctly. These attacks work because the normal privileges checking behavior within the processor is subverted through the interaction of features like speculative execution, branch prediction, out-of-order execution, and caching.*

 *https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-protect-your-server-against-the-meltdown-and-spectre-vulnerabilities

As well as updates and patches being applied by Digital Ocean to protect our machines, DOAJ’s technical partners, Cottage Labs, will also use the downtime to perform some other, non-related essential maintenance actions.
We apologise in advance for the short notice but we have only just received notification from Digital Ocean that they will work on our machines this week.
If you have any questions, then please leave a comment here or contact us feedback@doaj.org.