BBO faced a denial of service attack (DDoS) last Thursday, which put strain on our systems, leading to slowness and occasional malfunctions. This had been successfully resolved within hours of the attack.

Our tech team worked diligently to identify the source of the attack, implemented effective countermeasures, and restored normal operations.

You might be asking yourself, what is a denial of service attack. It’s a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal functioning of a website by overwhelming it with a flood of internet traffic. In a DDoS attack, multiple compromised computers are used to send a massive volume of requests or data to a server. This flood of traffic exceeds the target’s capacity to handle it, causing the service to become slow or completely unavailable to legitimate users. This is what happened to BBO last Thursday.

This all sounds a bit scary, and it is difficult to handle these situations. But we’re up to the challenge, and in this instance we managed to get things under control quickly, without too much disturbance for our players.

Simply put, it’s a shame that there are malicious types out there who just want to cause disruption. We need to stick together, as we’re working hard to make sure that attacks of this nature don’t happen again, and if they do, that we have all the necessary protocols in place to nip them in the bud.

We know we can count on your support, when we face issues like this. After all, this was an attack on our ability to play the game we love. Right now we're going to get back to the day job, to bring you the very best bridge experience possible.

Here’s a summary of what happened

On Thursday, September 7, at approximately 4:30 PM US Eastern Time (10:30PM Central European Time) the BBO system became unstable. Our team identified the underlying cause as a denial of service attack, which put strain on our systems, leading to slowness and occasional malfunctions.

The situation was mitigated at approximately 8PM US Eastern Time (2AM Central European Time), and as of Friday, September 8 at 3AM US Eastern (9AM Central European Time) BBO became fully operational again.

Please don’t hesitate to contact our support team on support@bridgebase.com if you have any questions relating to this.

And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter (now X) to get all latest updates https://twitter.com/BridgeBase

As always, thank you for your patience and understanding.

The BBO Team