Stability and service issues on July 2nd

We experienced interruptions to various services on Stockhouse.com on Wednesday July 2nd. Many of you contacted us at Support with concerns around this and we can now provide an explanation of what happened. Starting around 11:30 AM EST on July 2nd our market data provider experienced a DDoS network attack. This type of attack is designed to make the system unavailable to users by flooding the servers with artificially created requests for information. More specifics on this type of attack can be found on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack

The team at our market data provider worked hard to mitigate the effects and many services were back up by that afternoon with some data services available intermittently throughout the day and full stable services reinstated before the following Market open on Thursday July 3rd. Our data provider has taken measures with new infrastructure improvements to prevent a reoccurrence of this issue.

In addition to these network improvements by our data provider we at Stockhouse are working towards reducing our reliance on external network resources with the goal to mitigate the impact of potential future outages to your experience of Stockhouse.com