Is AWeber Down? Hackers Take Popular Email Marketing Service Offline With DDoS Attack

AWeber Communications, a company that provides email marketing and auto-response software, has been taken offline by hackers.

On Monday at 1:52 p.m. EST, AWeber tweeted that it was investigating an “unscheduled site interruption.” AWeber directed concerned customers to a status page, but it seems the hackers were able to take this offline as well.

Since then, AWeber’s social media manager, Brandon Olson, has had his hands full responding to hundreds, possibly thousands, of tweets from concerned customers who were unable to make email blasts.

On Monday afternoon, AWeber tweeted that the problem was the result of a “distributed denial-of-service” or DDoS attack, a common technique used by hackers to take a website offline by overloading its host server.

An alternative status page -- set up by AWeber to provide live updates -- indicates that the DDoS attack has hit just about every portion of the service. The main site, customer logins, email sending, APIs, subscriber sign ups, sign up form hosting, image hosting and newsletter archives are all down with a “major outage.”

Some users’ websites were even loading slowly because of the JavaScript from an AWeber form. AWeber has told users to add “defer” to the script, and it should solve the loading issue.

AWeber doesn't currently have a timeline for when it will be back online, but CEO Tom Kulzer told International Business Times that AWeber is devoting "all available resources" and working with Windstream (AWeber's third-party service provider) to solve the issue.

"First of all, I want to deeply apologize to our customers for the interruptions in service that they've experienced over the last two days," Kulzer wrote in an email. Kulzer compared this DDoS attack to the one that took CloudFlare offline in recent weeks, which some called the "biggest DDoS ever."

"We've been the target of a malicious and repetitive DDoS attack," Kulzer said. "While we have systems in place to deal with attacks, the nature and severity of this attack is on a massive scale."

AWeber was founded in 1998 and is based in Chalfont, Pa. According to the company’s Wikipedia page, AWeber provides email newsletters, autoresponders, sign up forms, RSS-to-email services and analytics to more than 120,000 customers around the world.