Many of you may know that 1ShoppingCart (and it’s many “white label” versions) was down for most of yesterday afternoon. When I logged into a client’s 1ShoppingCart account today, the following message from 1ShoppingCart popped up.

(1ShoppingCart has many “white label” versions/”private resellers” such as KickstartCart, Cartville, 1AutomationWiz, PracticePaySolutions, and others – anything that starts with “https://www.mcssl.com/” in the URL when you log in.)

Yesterday, July 14th 2010, we encountered a service interruption from approximately 3:18PM EDT until 7:20PM EDT.

We apologize for yesterday’s service interruption. We understand that it is our responsibility to ensure best-in-class service availability. We take this responsibility very seriously and therefore want to share with you the facts. It is important to note that throughout this outage, your data remained entirely safe and secure.

Yesterday’s service interruption was caused by a denial of service attack, which was aimed towards our systems. A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of the concerted efforts to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all. As you may know, every major provider is attacked every single day, and on occasion perpetrators achieve some or all of their goals. Even some of the biggest websites on the Internet are not immune to these types of attacks.

Our monitoring systems alerted us of a potential issue at 3:18PM EDT and immediately our Engineering teams began work to defend against this attack. We are confident that this outage, while it may have seemed lengthy, was mitigated as quickly as possible. During the entire time, our Client Services team was posting constant updates to our Twitter account in an attempt to keep you informed on our progress. We appreciated your support and understanding while we worked to get you back online.

The nature of these attacks are constantly evolving and each attack is different. We will continue to invest in our systems and continue to work endlessly to regain your confidence in our system and make 1ShoppingCart the most reliable and stable shopping cart solution available. We commit to you, our customers, that there is nothing more important to us than ensuring 1ShoppingCart is there when you need it.

If you would like to discuss this in more detail, please call 1-888-792-1961.