If you’ve tried to reach the Fantrax home page for the past few days you’ve probably noticed it is down. Before assuming they went out of business and were just trying to rip us off with the lifetime membership offer, I checked their twitter account. Apparently they botched an upgrade they were running last Friday and experienced a DDoS attack starting Monday. Kinda sounds like a ‘dog ate my homework’ excuse to me. You might have fun ripping them on their Facebook page. Looks like plenty of other people have been. BAAAAHHH!!
From Fantrax.
Dear Friends, if your league experienced any downtime or slowness over the last few days, we sincerely apologize.
Our recent growth has occurred faster than expected, and with the upcoming football season around the corner, we had to perform a multi-stage major upgrade to the entire system over the past week. Most of it went completely unnoticed, but on Friday afternoon, and unexpected failure occurred, causing many leagues to be inaccessible during the time it took us to fix this, which was about 4 hours. We then took Fantrax offline for a scheduled (with a notification) time from about 2:30am ET to 6:30am ET. There were some temporary data inconsistencies after that for about two hours, but they were all fixed. The upgrade was completed Saturday by noon ET.
Then, completely unrelated to the past upgrade (but an unfortunate coincidence) on Monday, our DNS provider, EasyDNS, got DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacked, which caused our site (and thousands of other sites) to act slow for most users, and even become inaccessible for some. The site remained slow or inaccessible until about 2am Tuesday, when the problem was temporarily fixed. Many users were still unable to access Fantrax, and as of Tuesday 8:30pm ET, there are still about 5-10% of Fantrax users that cannot access the site, due to the time it takes some internet providers to refresh their DNS name cache. We are implementing a two-phased approach that will hugely reduce the probability of this happening again, and also reduce the down-time to about 10-20 minutes in the unlikely event that there is another attack.
We again apologize for the inconvenience this caused those who were affected. Also, we want to emphasize that the above occurrences have been completely mitigated and they will not happen again. We fully expect you to enjoy the rest of your leagues’ seasons interruption-free. For those of you who have been with Fantrax for the past few years, you know that this is just a blip. For Fantrax newcomers, please allow us to impress you with a flawless remainder to your season!
Thanks,
The Fantrax Team
This is the temp site.
Shades