Emergency Maintenance for DDoS attack prevention

This incident of DDoS has been resolved.

Emergency server maintenance on July20th, UTC 02:50 ~ UTC 03:45
[Cause]
- A DDoS attack that started on July 20th, UTC 01:12 affected one of our servers that lead to players being unable to load the client starting UTC 01:55
- This server was migrated to a new cloud datacenter during the maintenance on July 16th for better performance and to account for increased load during WSOP, but the tech team made a mistake of not shielding this server with our DDoS protection service after the migration.
[Actions Taken]
- This configuration server was added to the DDoS protection service (CloudFlare)
- All other servers were checked and added to the DDoS protection service
- A second layer of DDoS protection will be added for increased protection

DDoS Protection has been set up.

DDoS attack has been detected and identified. We're preparing the protection from DDoS attack.

Official Statement Regarding Incidents on July 19th
1) Server Delays (Client loading, Login, Cash Game hand dealing, Spin & Gold table loading, Tournament registration and tournament table loading)
- UTC 13:53 July 19th ~ UTC 17:11 July 19th
[Cause]
- Increased load on account service due to an influx of players and observers resulting in service bottlenecks
[Actions Taken]
- Issued a temporary fix during the server-downtime of July 20th to alleviate the issue.
- Will move services that were causing the bottlenecks to other servers thereby distributing the load (by emergency maintenance on July 24th
2) Two incidents of widespread client disconnections
- UTC 17:48 July 19th and UTC 18:17 July19th
[Cause]
- While performing tournament table configuration changes (increase of late registration time to account for delays in 1), there was a case of server-client protocol mismatch between the tournament service and game client that lead to certain clients being disconnected
[Actions Taken]
- Fixed all protocol mismatches on July 20th and issued client hotfix
3) WSOP Events #32, #33 not resuming after the break
[Cause]
- Unforseen bug (multithread timing issue) caused by high load during peak times
[Actions Taken]
- Issued a temporary fix during the server-downtime of July 20th to alleviate the issue.
- Will issue more comprehensive fixes by the emergency maintenance on July 24th to fix the root cause.
- At the worst case, even if these incidents were to happen again, we will add code to manually re-start the tournaments affected by July 24th