best practices - DDOS Attack Victim - How much to Admit?

Here's the environment:

1. Website that hosts a forum/journal/bboard/email/socialmedia application in walled garden (ie you pay to get to use it or are invited to do so




2. Many Clients pay to use the site during specific chunks of time (ie they lease access to site) in order to interact with their clients. There are dozens of clients in a broad range of fields.




3. There is a very broad service level agreement. Meaning that it's not stated that the website can't go down for more than ten minutes but there's a gentleman's agreement that it won't. They don't pay for the 24/7 support be we give it to them because we love what we do.




4. Site runs in 7 different languages throughout multiple time zones.

Here's the situation:

The site goes down at 5:30EST and stays "offline" for approximately two hours due to DDOS attack. The clients reactions vary from annoyed to livid. The clients are also not very tech savvy. The clients are accustomed to 24/7 support and typically receive great support.

Here's the question:

How much to you divulge to the client about the DDOS attack? They want a reason as to why the site went down.

Answer

Be honest. A DDoS attack is likely to be beyond your control (or at least beyond your ability to predict).

If it is a DoS caused by a bug in your code (or by someone exploiting a bug in your code specifically to create a DoS) then things get more difficult as there is blame that could be sent your way, but for a DDoS that is genuinely beyond your control then honest is definitely the best policy.

If your users want an uptime policy that states "won't down down for longer then X in Y or for any period longer than Z for any reason" then they need to be paying you for a service level agreement that states those rules rather than living on a gentlemen's agreement.