Uh-oh what's up with btc-e?

[djdollabill]

The site's been down all day.  Are they still dealing with ddos?  Bitinstant wants you to use them, but I worry about the site not being available.  Now that bitinstant removed the option for direct coins to address, will probably have to use mtgox..

[byzantine]

According to Bitcoincharts, they've been down for 11 hours: http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/

I was integrating a trading bot with their API at the time, and it took me an hour of trying to fix the software before I reloaded their site.  :facepalm:

BTC-e DNS is handled by Cloudflare (https://www.cloudflare.com/overview), which should outright prevent or at least mitigate any DDoS attack.

From the domain's WHOIS info, you can see that the DNS records were last updated on:
2013.02.14,
2013.02.17 07:53:59 MSK/MSD,
2013.02.17 11:32:45 MSK/MSD
2013.02.17 12:03:42 MSK/MSD

Their public IP address has also changed at least twice in the last 24 hours, which you can see from the DiG command performed earlier:

$ dig a btc-e.com @brad.ns.cloudflare.com
;; ANSWER SECTION:
btc-e.com.      30   IN   A   141.101.123.139
btc-e.com.      30   IN   A   190.93.240.139
;; WHEN: Sat Feb 16 23:21:19 2013

$ dig a btc-e.com @brad.ns.cloudflare.com
;; ANSWER SECTION:
btc-e.com.      30   IN   A   108.162.204.148
btc-e.com.      30   IN   A   108.162.203.148
;; WHEN: Sun Feb 17 20:36:06 2013

$ dig a btc-e.com @brad.ns.cloudflare.com
;; ANSWER SECTION:
btc-e.com.      30   IN   A   178.248.232.6
;; WHEN: Sun Feb 17 20:59:51 2013

The two most likely causes of their site being down that I can think of are:
1) They've just moved from their previous DNS hosting provider to Cloudflare to provide increased resistance to the type of attacks they've recently been subjected to.
2) They're moving datacentre or performing critical hardware upgrades

My guess is that they'll be online imminently since the first three IP addresses used earlier today all belonged to Cloudflare, but the most recent one (178.248.232.6) is registered to one Alexander Asimov of Denegnyi lane 18, 119002 Moscow....

[djdollabill]

Great, can't wait to send my hard-earned fiat there!

[payb.tc]

lol, skin of my teeth... got in and out just before the down time

(with a TOR burner account as described in another thread)

if this never comes back online again i will have dodged another bullet, ha

without BTC-E though, where does one turn to for a 'LTC/BTC' rate? what's the next-most patronised exchange?

[byzantine]

They're not down yet:

You've come to the Web site btc-e.com.
Qrator Networks prevents and mitigates DDoS attacks. All HTTP requests to the btc-e.com pass through our network for traffic filtering.
Connection to the backend server of btc-e.com cannot be established. Try accessing btc-e.com later.

Sincerely, Qrator Networks
www.qrator.net

Cloudflare just go swapped for a solution closer to home, Qrator Networks.

[byzantine]

...and https://btc-e.com/ is back.

support: ddos killed router in the data center 24

As predicted, looks like they were performing critical hardware upgrades!