iContact’s site and application went down early yesterday morning (July 14th) after a DDoS attack on their server. For those unfamiliar with what a DDoS attack is, DDoS stands for “Distributed-Denial-of-Service.” This type of malware attack is fairly new, and there is not a lot of information regarding its origin. However, what information is available can be found on the ShadowServer site discussing a recent attack that impacted sites from Amazon.com and Yahoo.com to government sites.

Teams at iContact worked all day yesterday and through the night last night to get the site and application back up and running, though even with these efforts, up-time has been “sporadic” according to an email from iContact CEO, Ryan Allis. Engineers at iContact are working to implement a more definite and permanent solution to guard against these attacks this morning. Intermittent downtime is expected until this solution has been put into place, so iContact asks for continued patience during this process.

We are asking the same from our affiliates during this time, because as the site goes down, referrals are nearly impossible, or at best slow. Don’t worry, your links are fine. They haven’t broken and we haven’t killed the re-directs. Once the servers have been completely protected against these DDoS threats all referral traffic should return to normal.

While waiting, you can stay up to date on the latest in a few different ways. One way is to follow @iContactCorp or @icontact on Twitter. They are regularly posting updates regarding the situation as they are available. Also, you can stay tuned to the iContact blog or the iContact Facebook page which currently has the email sent out by CEO Ryan Allis late last night or this morning regarding the situation.

If you have any other questions regarding how this impacts you as an affiliate, feel free to email us at iContact@mgecom.com and we will address your concerns.

Again, thank you for your patience and pass our appreciation along to any clients you have referred.