Barracuda Networks outage?

We have a Barracuda Spam Firewall and we love it but something bad is apparently happening today. It appears that either there is an outage at Barracuda or they are getting DDOSed. All attempts to connect to their website are failing and when you call any of the phone numbers you get a couple of rings, then a fast busy signal. This doesn’t bode well.

For a while, the message queue in our spam firewall was growing rapidly. As a temporary remedy, I turned off all RBL lookups (Block/Accept -> External Blacklist). The message queue has now dropped back to its normal level, but it still takes forever to load the main management page (probably because part of it needs to phone home to ‘cuda in order to check our subscription status.)

Under the “Energize Updates:” there is an error message that says “Problem (Please contact Barracuda Networks Technical Support. Code: -9).” Yikes.

Update (11:44:26 a.m. CDT): Yep, something’s going on. Their website now loads, but with this message (note the misspelling):

Barracauda Networks is currently down for maintenance. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Update II (1:18:16 p.m. CDT): Things seem to be getting back to normal now. Barracuda’s web site is back up and running and the forums indicate that there was a problem with the virus definitions that were issued earlier today. Make sure your virus defs are 1.5.145 (2006-06-13) or later. I’m going to turn on RBL checks again.

We had a pretty big spike in messages (twice what we normally receive) between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. today that may have been related, but man it was ugly.

Update III (7:37:55 a.m. CDT, June 14): Barracuda has confirmed officially that it was a virus definition update (.144) that caused the error. It was due to a partial virus def being released.

Comments (2) »

1. Katie (guess whooooo??? ^-^) says:

   6/15/2006 at 10:24 am

   Hehro daddy!! I finally figured out how to comment joo!!! Go me.

   I didn’t much understand what you said other than something bad happened with something new,(understandable, since it’s new… er… I think it is anyhow… Loll), and then something weird happened that was a pain, and then something got fixed! So good for you!! Great jeeeeeoooooorrrrrrb! …. Jeeeeeaaaaaooooorrrrrb!!!!! Jaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrb!!!!!!! Great job! I mean….. great job! I mean…. great.. job….. loll I slay me. ^-^

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2. Toby Simmons says:

   6/15/2006 at 10:35 am

   You are so funny, kiddo!

   Actually, I didn’t really fix anything but you are very kind.

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