SurveyGizmo down two days straight after its hosting provider ‘called it a night’

Surveys around the web are turning up blank as SurveyGizmo entered its second day under siege by a denial of service attack this morning. The company was close to restoring service last night when its service provider, ViaWest, abandoned the recovery attempt.

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We are still down. Our data service provider (Viawest) has decided to call it quits for the night, even though we are almost recovered…

— SurveyGizmo (@SurveyGizmo) March 27, 2014

Meanwhile, most people who are attempting to respond to surveys are seeing something like this:Naturally, SurveyGizmo was not happy with ViaWest’s decision — and expressed that on Twitter.

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I hate to call them out, but we are very disappointed.

— SurveyGizmo (@SurveyGizmo) March 27, 2014

SurveyGizmo has been active on Twitter explaining the situation to its users, who have seen their surveys interrupted and have been disappointing their users with unreachable forms and empty pages, particularly in the case of SurveyGizmo’s embeddable surveys, which are currently simply leaving gaps in pages.

CEO Christian Vanek reached out to customers with an email in the wee hours of this morning:

We are still down. Our data service provider Viawest has decided to call it quits for the night. We are very disappointed to say the least. But we are at this time completely at their mercy until their primary technicians come back tomorrow.

That said, we will be getting back online with Viawest at 7am MT to try to complete the migration to CloudFlare with them.

We were able to restore all services that do not rely on Viawest — but that’s not much as we depend on them greatly. Luckily our website (the new version) is online and protected against the attack. We also put up a message on survey links that will explain what’s happening so you’re [sic] customers don’t get an error or a white page.

You’re [sic] data is completely safe and your surveys are waiting there for us to be able to connect them with our new network. So we are very close.

I know that many of you had critical surveys online today. Please contact our support team if there is anything we can do to help you recover. If you had clients effected [sic] that need personal reassurance about SurveyGizmo as a survey provider I am happy to communicate with them directly on your behalf.

With DOS and DDOS attacks becoming an increasing reality of the web, it’s getting to the point that every company that depends on the web needs a plan for defending against them — and most certainly a hosting provider with 24/7 service that can help until a problem is resolved, no matter how late it is.

(VentureBeat uses SurveyGizmo for our VB Intel surveys, so you may have noticed our downtime as a result.)