Astrill Down, PornHub Down [UPDATE]

We’re still awaiting word from Astrill support, but in case you’re wondering, yes, the popular VPN service is down — both the website and service itself. We don’t know if it has anything to do with China, but probably not — “technical problem,” says Astrill.com. Look at that emoticon – that is the sorriest goddamn sad-face I’ve ever seen.

Equally disconcerting, it appears PornHub — which has survived Chinese Internet kill-switches and myriad anti-pornography sweeps — has finally fallen under the axe here. We’re not sure when this happened, and without a VPN we can’t go on GreatFire.org to check, but it’s done. Goddamn you, Chinese Internet.

On the bright side, Pornwall.com remains up — ahem — by which I mean accessible without a VPN. Go crazy, folks.

UPDATE, 2/28, 2:04 am: Astrill mass email:

First of all we would like to apologize to all our customers for the unexpected downtime. The rumors of Astrill being blocked or taken down by the authorities are false and have no element of truth in them. You can read below what exactly happened:

Yesterday at around 20:00 CET, our hosting company had a network outage due to an alleged DDoS attack. They have made some changes to their network equipment to remedy the attack and prevent it in the future. However, whatever changes they performed, this has caused our VLAN network used to communicate between our servers to be broken. We have contacted the hosting company to look into the issue.

We are working now to fix our service and trying to get in touch with our hosting company for an explanation and backups of all our files. Rest assure, our technicians are working around the clock to restore all services as soon as possible.

Now we can just ask you for your patience and understanding. Please be assured we will restore all the services and customers will be compensated for this downtime.

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