Ancestry.com became the latest target of a cyber attack, when the site was knocked offline for three days.
The geneology company on Monday tweeted about "intermittent problems," which persisted through Tuesday, and after multiple fixes, returned again Wednesday.
The site appears to have regained control and returned to normal on Thursday. Ancestry.com did not reveal any details about the outage, except to say that it was hit with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
According to a Facebook post by Ancestry.com Chief Technology Officer Scott Sorensen, no consumer data was compromised.
However, the Utah-based company's sister site, findagrave.com, was also victimized causing it and Ancestry.com to crash.
The attack forced Ancestry.com to disable its sync and search features in Family Tree Maker (FTM), "until we're certain that site stability has been fully restored," the Facebook post said. "In the mean time, we recommend that you work in 'offline' mode and that you do *not* try syncing your tree."
Thank you again for your patience - we know how frustrating this has been. <hugs for all>
— Ancestry.com (@ancestry) June 17, 2014"We want to apologize for the inconvenience this has caused and also thank you for your amazing support, as this may have interrupted some of your family history research," Sorensen wrote.
Users managed to stay calm during the three-day disruption, writing kind messages of thanks to Ancestry, and acknowledging the company's quick response to the attack.
"We understand how frustrating this can be for our customers, and please know that it was just as frustrating for us, too," Sorensen said. "We appreciate your patience and support as we dealt with this unfortunate incident against Ancestry."
The self-proclaimed leading online family history resource, was acquired by an investor group in the fall of 2012, led by European private-equity firm Permira, in a deal valued at $1.6 billion.
For more, see PCMag's review of Ancestry.com.
Last week, the Feedly Web and mobile apps were knocked offline twice after a DDoS; Evernote was also affected.