At 20:21 BST, we began receiving alerts from our monitoring services indicating that system response times were significantly slower than normal.

By 20:30 BST, the system became unresponsive, impacting key services including Widget Booking, payment processing (workers), and the Dashboard.

We identified the root cause as a DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attack—a type of cyberattack aimed at overwhelming systems to make them unresponsive.

To mitigate the issue, we immediately took countermeasures:

Upgraded our database infrastructure and connection pooling

Enabled additional protection via our cloud-based security layer, which now sits in front of our web applications

At 21:03 BST, we successfully restored the Widget Booking service so customers could resume bookings. The Dashboard remained offline temporarily as we continued monitoring system stability.

After observing sustained stability and consistent booking traffic for over 30 minutes, we re-enabled the Dashboard at 21:45 BST, restoring full system functionality for our partners.

We sincerely apologize for the disruption and appreciate your patience. Our team worked diligently to respond quickly and keep you informed throughout the incident.

If you have any further questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to reach out.