Flyertalk down again, AAAARRRRGH

by Gary Leff

Flyertalk came back online for me on Saturday, much of the world couldn’t access it until Sunday night.  But now… the occasional page will partially come up for me after a long wait, but that’s it.

Best guess — and this is just speculation, I really have no idea — is that all Internet Brands websites have been under a DDOS attack by someone or some group angry at the way they’ve managed the vBulletin software which they acquired in 2007.

This likely has nothing to do with Flyertalk, per se, but is really driving me nuts!

Keep hitting the comments here to express yourself about miles and points in the interim, hopefully it’ll help to keep us all sane while we’re without Flyertalk.

UPDATE: Flyertalk appears back at 9am easern!

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. Well, I wasn’t aware that IB owned vBulletin — suddenly their ownership of FT makes even more sense.

    Sounds like an OMNI thread in the making — how could IB suck even more than they do now?

  2. Since FT is down, here’s a points and miles response:

    I’m 4000 miles short of PM with Delta for this year. Been contemplating a trip/MR to get the miles as it doesn’t seem I’m going to travel for work again this year. Any suggstions? I’d prefer flying from MSN, but MKE and ORD are do-able.

  6. @RichMSN, are you sure you don’t want to stop now and roll over 21K MQMs towards next year??

    Otherwise you can do a same-day turn MKE-MSP-SEA-MEM-MKE on Sun.12/13 for isntance for $214

  8. I’ve been PLT for the past 4 years now and I still perceive value in being STE+ rather than STE since I do travel internationally from time to time. I did think about it, though, at least for a short amount of time.

    I am banking that this year was a simple aberration as in past years I’ve exceeded 125K EQM easily.

    Seattle is do-able. I have friends there I haven’t seen in some time, so I’ll have to look into that one. Thanks for the suggestions.

  11. Here in Shanghai I have not been able to get Flyertalk for several days. Is anyone seeing it back online yet anywhere in Asia?

  15. Looks like it may have gone down again at 9am EST, although I wonder if the site is getting a lot of extra traffic due to the FAA computer problem affecting US flights.

  17. Looks like FlyerTalk is down again as of this monring, and all requests are being directed to a filesharing site, dupedb.com.

  20. Looks like flyertalk.com is redirecting to dupedb.com, which appears to be a spam/malware site.

    Looks like the hackers were successful.

    Hopefully the forum database is intact and isn’t compromised and it’s just a webserver redirection.

  22. The DupeDB site is what originally appeared as a bogus link on the FT home page. Now all FT addresses are redirecting to DupeDB. Yikes.

    It’s times like this that make me long for TireFlock!

  24. This is absolutely ridiculous that FT is still down on 26 November 2009 – I havn’et had access for 10 days now. What are they doing to solve this problem? Can’t they hire an IT expert to get back online?

    I have seen no communications by email to FlyerTalk members except for replies to a few threads I am subscribed to – and I wonder how those posts are even getting made.

Comments are closed.