Secure Hosting / UPG unavailable

[Goz]

For those who use Secure Hosting I've just received this email :

For processing card payments to the various acquiring banks, SecureHosting utilises the services of Universal Payment Gateway, one of the biggest payment transit providers in the UK. Earlier this afternoon they experienced issues in their systems, resulting in all payments failing and also resulting in a backlog on our own systems. UPG are working to resolve the issues at their end as a matter of the utmost urgency.
All we can do at this stage is to provide updates, as the actual cause of the outage is not within our own networks.
We will be staying on to cover phones this evening, but we kindly request that if possible, you communicate with us by email to reduce the number of calls our engineers are handling. We will gladly respond to any requests for updates.
We apologise for the inconvenience caused and look forward to providing more updates shortly.
We will be updating our status page at regular intervals :-
http://www.secure-server-hosting.com/ct/ctcount.php?key=007844510088385200010112

Kind Regards
SecureHosting Support Team

[Goz]

Fixed

Update from Secure Hosting :

UPG Outage - UPDATE 20:00
We have now been informed that the UPG system is again accepting transactions.
The UPG engineers are performing a detailed investigation of the causes, and of course to identify any measures that can avoid a re-occurrence of this type of issue. In the 5 years since we integrated our service with UPG we have never seen such a lengthy outage as this, as the system is run at an enterprise level with many high street names using it for their card payments.
We have received an initial summary of the incident, which essentially revolves around a persistent DOS style attack from certain merchants on their network. Even after those merchants were shut off by UPG, some key elements of the UPG network did not return to normal and low-level reboots resulted in more serious network issues.
If you would like further details, we would be glad to supply you with these.
This has been an extraordinary incident and we deeply regret the impact this has had on your business. We will be liaising closely with UPG over the next few days to study their findings.
If you have any questions regarding this please don't hesitate to contact us using the details below.
Please also check our status page for this and any other network incidents :-
http://www.secure-server-hosting.com/ct/ctcount.php?key=007844590088388300010112