Virgin America's Website Hacked?
Update: From the man himself, Gareth Edmondson Jones says it was some sort of crazy SYN flood attack that hit them yesterday. We aren't going to pretend to know what that means, but what we do know is the Virgin America site is now up and running like a Kenyan marathoner. More next week.
Virgin America is claiming hackers slowed down their first day of ticket sales yesterday. Customers had to rely on phone reservations because of site wonkiness. Huh? Our first thought was maybe the media, known to interchange the word "hack" and "web traffic" in the past may have done so here. However, a quick search on Digg shows us no Virgin America ticket sales story registered on the popular news sharing site yesterday, which has been known to bring down an under prepared server in the past. And while VA's first day was definitely covered by most major media outlets yesterday it isn't like the company wasn't prepared for the consistent traffic onslaught.
Virgin spokesman Gareth Edmondson Jones said the airline is fixing the problem and trying to identify the culprits. Furthermore, the San Jose Mercury News is saying the problem only hit users in California. Nope. We were here in the Northeast banging on the site all day yesterday, and it was super sluggish to non responsive.
"Hacker" theories are this way.
All this brings us back to the alleged "hack" and these "culprits". It just seemed unlikely to us. So we dug around a bit. At first it seemed all the pretty Flash animations on the VA home page could have contributed to the sluggishness, which is continuing today, by the way, in times of monster traffic. However, then we found something a tad more revealing, possibly. If you do an Alexa search on Virgin America you will notice Virgin Atlantic stats pop up. Furthermore, if you graph the two sites together you will see they mirror each other. You don't think Virgin is hosting both Virgin America and Virgin Atlantic on the same server configuration do you? We wouldn't base anything on what Alexa, a free and often unreliable web stats service tells us, but you never know.
Of course we are just theorizing here, which is all we can do when we get odd information like "Virgin America Hacked" with no real explanation. What we really want is for the Virgin America site to be lightning fast so we can check out some ticket prices.
Hopefully soon.
Finding good deals or bad ones on Virgin's site? Let us know about 'em in comments.
Related Stories:
· Virgin America Coverage [Jaunted]
· Our Virgin America Tour [Jaunted]
· Virgin America Website [Official Site]
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