Since our initial statement on September 12, we've had a lot of press coverage and other developments have taken place. Here's an update. Our original statement is available here.

First: We are *not* going out of business. Had we been unable to contain the damage, we might have been in very serious trouble. As it happens, however, we were able to take steps immediately to protect our machines. The attacks have continued sporadically since they began, but they aren't perceptibly interfering with our service.

Second: Contrary to certain reports, the attacks are in no way comparable to mail bombing. That's a term used to describe a different kind of denial of service attack. The SYN attack consisted of a huge volume of very small, standard "wake-up" messages that are part of the normal transfer of packets between machines on the Internet. The packets could not be processed efficiently because the attacker had made them appear to come from sites that do not exist, and it took many seconds for our machines to give up an attempt to provide a normal response. (A mailbomb attack consists of lots of high-volume email messages to jam up a system and overflow disk space.)

Third: Our own system is set up so that our users cannot launch an attack of this kind. We had done that already. We would like to see all other providers take similar steps. It's very much easier to stop it at the source than to deal with it on the receiving end.

Finally: We want to express our gratitude to all our friends for the outpouring of support we've had over the last few weeks. It's been an exciting and an exhausting time, and it's good to know we have made so many friends. Our heartfelt thanks to all of you!