Denial-of-Service Attack (DDoS) 

We have experienced a very large distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) on our server facility. The attack is targeted against our domain name servers (DNS) specifically, however this directly affects both hosting and mail server connectivity. We have currently blocked several thousand DDoS IPs and are continuing to contain the issue. We will keep everyone posted as we learn more.

A distributed denial of service attack occurs when multiple compromised systems flood the bandwidth or resources of a targeted system, usually a web server(s). These systems are compromised by attackers using a variety of methods.

In computer security, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Typically the targets are high-profile web servers where the attack is aiming to cause the hosted web pages to be unavailable on the Internet. It is a computer crime that violates the Internet proper use policy as indicated by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB).  From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org.