Rackspace Hit With 12 Hour DDoS Attack. What about 100% Uptime Guarantee

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According to various reports, Rackspace was hit with a DDoS attack on its DNS services that impacted its domains, along with customer websites. Their service was fully restored after 12 hours. The attack occurred against 3 data centers: Northern Virginia, Chicago and London. This event is out of the ordinary because Rackpace has massive infrastructure in place, and Tbps of bandwidth capacity. On top of that they partner with Akamai in some areas. However, it looks like Rackspace might have impacted its own customers by implementing security rules that were a bit to stringent, thus blocking legitimate traffic along illegitimate traffic.

Rackspace Snapshot

  • Market Cap: $6.9B
  • 2014 Revenues: On track to reach about $1.8B
  • Number of Employees: 5900+
  • 6 Data Centers: Dallas, Chicago, Northern Virginia, London, Hong Kong, Sydney
  • Using 9 Network Carriers
  • “219 CDN Edge Locations”
  • Akamai Partner
  • Network and Security Powered by Cisco and Arbor Networks
  • “Full Redundant Enterprise-class Routing”

The attack raises a thorny issue for Rackspace because they guarantee 100% network up-time, and anything less means a credit is owed.

Rackspace SLA

“We guarantee that our data center will be available 100% of the time in a given month, excluding scheduled or emergency maintenance. Otherwise, we apply a 5% credit of your monthly fee for each 30 minutes of network downtime, up to 100% of your monthly fee for the affected server.”

If a customer experienced 12 hours of downtime, here is the math:

  • 12 hours / 30 minutes = 22 Units x 5% = 120% (Full Month Credit)

The moral of the story is its probably a good time to partner with Akamai, at least as a backup.

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