Recent Emergency Maintenance and Tracker issues

As I'm sure people have noticed of late, we've been having intermittent tracker load issues (including today), and then today we had Unscheduled Emergency Maintenance.

So, what caused all this fuss?

We can't be sure on all of the tracker load issues, but today we had a confirmed DDoS attack that temporarily caused the tracker to overload. Our Datacenter quickly stepped in and null routed the source, however it was too late, the tracker had gone into overload, and takes a while to recover. However with the new information we gained thanks to the data center, we were able to take steps to hopefully prevent a similar style attack from being enough to take down the tracker on it's own again. We won't be going into details of our security precautions as that might just feed into the next time someone attacks. There are no signs this was anything more than an attempt to knock the tracker and website offline.