PSA: Denial of Service Attack Ongoing at www.ricksteves.com

Thanks for letting us know! Hope this does not spill over to your weekend!

Oh dear, sorry to hear that and good luck with resolution, which is not how you wanted to spend your Friday.

Oh wow. Bon courage in dealing with this, Andrew !

Thanks, Andrew. It does seem to have been working erratically today, when it worked at all.

Courage! When we don't get our RSE fix we're even more unruly than usual.

I thought that I had been blacklisted.

Onward Through The Fog as we say in Austin courtesy of Oat Willie

I knew something was going on around noontime because I kept getting the server error with the message that somehow RS got into the control room! Haha! Glad it seems to be working again.

Just got this. Oddly site has been spinning and nothing. Good luck!

Thank you for letting us know. I thought the problem was with my device because I also had trouble accessing some other websites. Good luck and good skill.

I think that it is up.

The website is not up and running on Chrome which I always use in my phone and desk top. But I can get it on Safari which I use on my phone if all else fails.

Seems to be working ok now.

Working on Chrome for me.

seems to be down again.

Still having trouble this morning.

had no problem just now. Glad to find it is up.

I noticed over the last few days that the main RS site has not always been accessible, but wasn't sure what the reason was. I can't imagine what these imbeciles hope to accomplish with denial-of-service attacks.

I can't imagine what these imbeciles hope to accomplish with denial-of-service attacks.

Money. They keep up the attack until they are paid.

Still having problems.

Glad I just saw this post! Maybe it should be pinned for a while until the issue is resolved?

I had been wondering what was going on for the past several days as I was having trouble accessing the site. I often just access the main site and then navigate to the Travel Forums so I didn't even realize the Forums was really a different site nor did I know the web address.

In any case, some times the site is working, some times it isn't.

i am now having what I consider to be a minor problem. I click on only to get buffering that never loads. I get out of it and then click on again. This second time, it will load. This has happened several times beginning yesterday.

@bostonphil7, unfortunately that is what a Denial of Service attack does. What it means is basically the Rick Steves web server(s) are being bombarded by traffic resulting in the web site being unresponsive because there is essentially an overload of traffic (communication) created by these attacks and the server(s) is/are not able to provide adequate response to each communication.

I'm not a tech person, so I don't know how they're going to solve malicious Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. Hope this is resolved soon!

I read somewhere online that three hospital were attacked Friday. I am talking about their technology not the physical hospitals. This was about the same time that we were having problems on this website.

So something was going on out there .......

I can't imagine what these imbeciles hope to accomplish with denial-of-service attacks.

Money. They keep up the attack until they are paid.

It's not always money, unfortunately. Sometimes they do it just for fun - or to prove they can.

Hello, I didn't check back in earlier as I wouldn't quite call this resolved just yet. It seems that most people can navigate our main site without getting a server error since Friday evening, and pages can still be slow to load. If you do get a Server Error message, please simply try again.

We've made it through this sort of thing before, and we'll do it again. Thanks again for your patience.

Thanks, Andrew - sorry you have to deal with all this!

It's all becoming clear now. I just came across this article today.....

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/6/hackers-increasingly-target-canada-key-infrastructure-spy-agency

I suppose this is a sad and unfortunate consequence of a world that now relies heavily on digital technology. Too bad these individuals don't have the ability to get an honest job, as I'm sure their skills would be useful.

Still experiencing issues this morning.

Still going on tonight in Florida

I had the problem this afternoon, but only on Chrome on my laptop. Able to access on my phone though. Seems to be an ongoing off and on thing.

Having issues with Android mobile. Especially slow to get to this forum.

Not working like normal all day in iPad.

I had problems with the forum loading all afternoon and difficulty posting. I did drop Andrew a message but I wasn’t sure if it was user error or what.

very slow today with many "prove you aren't a robot" interventions

Yes clearly Andrew and team are still battling the bad guys !!!

I couldn't connect on my Samsung tablet (Wi-Fi ony) for about 24 hours--got the "We're checking your connection" message, but it just cycled over and over again. Finally I tried my phone via cellular data and that worked. I couldn't figure out what was going on; I wondered whether hotel Wi-Fi from Latvia was suspect.

Eventually I remembered the (also Samsung) phone uses Chrome while the tablet defaults to Samsung internet, whatever that is. The tablet works if I select Chrome.

Anyone having trouble still?

Still having the "prove you aren't a robot" frequently, which on Wednesday when on public wifi, caused the system to "hang"

No trouble here.

I have not been paying attention but I do not think that I am having any problems today. I probably would have noticed if I was.

Hope that this is a better weekend than last.

I'm still getting a lot of prove human interference, around 3 or 4 hours ago still got the Rick dropped the ball pages

I'm having trouble still on my iphone, but not the laptop, which runs Linux Ubuntu. I haven't tried my Android tablet.

My desktop has no problems but my iPhone intermittently won’t load the RS site or is slow.

Thanks Andrew for all the time your department has spent fixing this. Enjoy a problem-free weekend.

Who in the world would DDOS Rick Steves?