Everyone has been very patient and understanding and we thank you during this frustrating time. We're still being attacked right now, but we're trying to get it so that every human (no attack bots please), no matter where you are or which computer you're on, can get to us.

Here's a good explanation as to what a DDoS or DoS attack is.

If you're interested in our answers to the following questions, then read this super duper long post.

1) Why can't I reach LiveJournal from [home|work|school] but it works at another place? Are you blocking my IP?
2) How come long entries/comments don't go through but short entries or replies do?
3) What happened to our email notifications?
4) How long is this going to last?

( Read the answers here )

bt

As some of you may know, LiveJournal has been under attack this morning from 6:00am PST until ??? We have taken steps to mitigate the DDoS but some users may still experience site connectivity problems. We are aware of these issues, and would like to take this moment to explain we are doing everything we can to keep the site up and running 100%, but some jobs / notifications / RSS feeds / Email notifications are not working 100% as expected. This is due in part to the steps we have taken to just allow the site to be on-line at this time.

We are aware of the problems and will be keeping a close eye on them to ensure that they do begin to function properly when the time is right. LJ may behave a little quirky for the time being, please bare with us...

Thank you for your understanding with this situation...

The SHA1 fingerprint is 7053F379C4EA34D0424FE9903FE2FE8E4856DD8E since some of you were asking us to post it.

We're using the same certificate as "www.livejournal.com" which is why -- depending on which client you use -- some of us are getting host/certificate mismatches. Some solutions are:

1. Accepting the cert, provided the sha1 fingerprint matches,
2. Accept the SSL "errors" or warnings,
3. (I've personally done this on Adium on a Mac but can't vouch for it working for you) change your Jabber server to "www.livejournal.com" from "livejournal.com".

I apologize for dropping this change on everyone without announcing it beforehand. We've been doing private beta testing for a few weeks now, simply because of the advantages that Tupshin outlined below. Recent changes to our codebase pushed our good ol' Djabber server over the edge, and we made the decision to switch Jabber servers a little early rather than try to waste cycles fixing the old server when we planned to cut over soon anyways.

The authentication problems that we've been having earlier today were due more to our database load rather than problems specific to the new Jabber server; lookups for your username/password and friends list currently are done against our database so when that was overloaded it prevented us from logging in or seeing our friends list. At this time, the service should be working well. If it isn't, please allow me to show you http://www.livejournal.com/support/.

Have a good weekend everyone!

bt

We have replaced the somewhat unreliable LJTalk Jabber server with a new one. The new one is based on ejabberd (http://www.ejabberd.im/).

Our expectation is that this will be a much more scalable and reliable solution and the chronic LJTalk downtime will be a thing of the past.

A couple of known issues:
1) All of your LJTalk contacts will probably move to a new livejournal.com group in your client.
2) Some clients might prompt you to accept a new certificate.

Please comment in this thread about your experiences or problems using the new server.

Just wanted to let everyone know, that a new version of MemcacheD has been released. We will be rolling this out to the memcache nodes during the week of July 20th to 24th. This should have very little impact on the stability of the website; however users may see a slight increase in load times as the cache is re-populated with entries.

The software has been tested and verified to be working just fine with the application; so we perceive this to be a very minimal risk in regards to updating, and the stability of the website.

***EDIT***  This upgrade has been completed. Everything is running smoothly... ***EDIT***

Thanks...