The Arch Linux Project has officially confirmed that its primary infrastructure services have been subjected to an ongoing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that has persisted for over a week.

The attack severely impacted user access to critical resources, including the main website, Arch User Repository (AUR), and community forums.

Key Takeaways
1. A week-long DDoS has taken down Arch Linux’s site, AUR, and forums.
2. DevOps uses rate limits, TCP SYN auth, and geo-mirrors.
3. Mitigation continues with partners, DDoS provider evaluation, and live status updates.

DDoS Attack Campaign

The DDoS campaign began affecting Arch Linux services around August 16, 2025, with Leonidas Spyropoulos from the DevOps team initially reporting service disruptions at 5:13 AM. The attack has specifically targeted three core infrastructure components:

archlinux.org (main website)

aur.archlinux.org (Arch User Repository)

bbs.archlinux.org (community forums)

The DevOps team confirmed on August 21 that the attack represents a sustained volumetric DDoS pattern designed to overwhelm the project’s hosting infrastructure through massive traffic floods.

The attack has triggered TCP SYN authentication mechanisms deployed by their hosting provider, causing initial connection resets before legitimate requests can be processed.

Additionally, the attack methodology involves Layer 3/4 flood attacks that saturate network bandwidth and exhaust server resources.

The team has implemented emergency rate limiting and traffic filtering measures while working with their data center operator to deploy additional DDoS scrubbing capabilities.

Emergency Workarounds

The Arch Linux team has established multiple failover mechanisms to maintain essential functionality during the ongoing attack:

For package management, users can leverage the pacman-mirrorlist package’s default mirror configuration when the primary reflector endpoint becomes unavailable.

The team maintains geo-distributed mirrors at geo.mirror.pkgbuild.com for ISO downloads, with mandatory GPG signature verification using key 0x54449A5C.

AUR package access remains possible through the GitHub mirror repository using the command:

Documentation access continues via the arch-wiki-docs and arch-wiki-lite packages, which contain recent snapshots of the official wiki content.

The team has established a dedicated status.archlinux.org endpoint for real-time service monitoring and incident communications, implementing automated health checks across all critical infrastructure components.

As this volunteer-driven project continues evaluating comprehensive DDoS protection providers while balancing cost, security, and ethical considerations, the DevOps team maintains operational security by keeping specific attack vectors and mitigation tactics confidential until the incident is fully resolved.

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