[Resolved] Web Hosting Issues May 24-26, 2023

May 24-26 2023 – Two recent issues caused brief or intermittent disruptions to websites hosted on our Plesk hosting servers. Workarounds were implemented and service was restored. Details follow…

May 24 2023 – Starting at 4:00 AM, on Wednesday, May 24, our Plesk hosting servers received a bad update to the Web Application Firewall (WAF), preventing the Apache web server from reloading or restarting. The cause was related to an upstream vendor that provides, and updates, the WAF ruleset. A workaround was implemented around 8:30 AM, which restored normal operation.

May 26 2023 – Another issue, occurred on May 26, causing intermittent errors when accessing websites (including Webmail) on our Plesk hosting servers. This issue may be related to the previous issue on May 24. The WAF ruleset vendor updated a package related to DoS attack mitigation, which caused domains to intermittently not be accessible in a browser, with either a 403 Forbidden error or with the 123 Apache Test Page. A workaround was implemented around 2:00 PM which restored normal operation.

Currently, things are running normally. We are continuing to monitor the situation and waiting for further updates from Plesk and the WAF vendor.