noticeboard.ru.ac.za

Connectivity to certain International sites is currently intermittent and very slow. Users may find that they have difficulty reaching these sites during the morning; the cache servers may return errors such as ERR_CONNECT_FAIL, ERR_READ_TIMEOUT, or ERR_DNS_FAIL whilst trying to fetch web pages from affected sites.

This problem is apparently due to a fault on Telkom/SAIX's peering link in New York, USA and is under investigation.

It appears that the cause of these problems is a distributed denial of service attack against various parts of the South African tertiary education network. This attack has now largely been mitigated but we're still experiencing some of the after efffects. Hopefully things will stabilise overnight and things will have returned to normal tomorrow.