It was DDoS attack, it's very hard to defend from something like that.
Thats what they say, could be true could be BS.
However there are two things that could have been done differently:
1. They released a new build hours before the World Tour events, and one of the iRacing Staff (Chris something) posted on the forum that the servers were under extreme loads due to heavy traffic
because of the new build and the Daytona events. Even if it was a DOS attack, releasing a new build just before a massive event was a bad call on their part. Why increase traffic from people trying the new build when you know hundreds of customers are going to participate in the Daytona 2.4?
2. Once the servers crashed (regardless of the reason) they panicked and moved the start of the race one hour after originally scheduled. The servers crashed minutes before the original start time, service was down for around 45 ~ 50 minutes and as soon as the servers came back up they announced (on their forum and twitter/facebook) the new start time. This announcement was made 10 minutes before the new start time. Some people had managed to start the original race and were racing oblivious to the fact that there was a new race time and some people had already walked away from their computers thinking the race was cancelled. In my opinion this was another big mistake. They cant simply assume that the 1000+ people registered for the race were notified of the new start time in 10 minutes.
I understand that bugs/glitches/attacks will happen, but when they do you should have a contingency plan in place. A lot of people missed the second race because of this, when iRacing realized they were under a dos attack there was no certainty that the new start time was going to work either, so how about postponing it for next day or next week instead of rushing it and throwing a new race at a random new time without notifying EVERYONE involved?
