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

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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.