Cafepress has notified members that they have had service interruption due to a Denial of Service Attack.  From AngelaCP:

Hi Shopkeepers,

The CafePress site was down for several hours yesterday evening due to a DoS attack. Our team was on top of it immediately and was able to make the system available as soon as possible. Service was restored at approximately 11:30PM PST and was running smoothly until approximately 8:30 AM this morning. The team is on it, knows the drill and service will be restored as soon as possible.

A DoS attack is a denial-of service attack, an attempt by someone to make our site unavailable to our users. A DoS attack is a computer crime and violates Internet proper use policy as dictated by the Internet Architecture Board.

Needless to say we are appalled that this has occurred because of what it does to our community. We hope that you understand that for your protection we are limited to what we are able to discuss regarding this as it is a security matter.

DoS attacks are, unfortunately, a problem for online businesses especially when they are time to coincide with busy shopping seasons such as Christmas.

Unfortunately the world is full of people who think that they have the right to interfere with other people making money legally and that get their jollies by doing stuff like this.

This is why I talk about not putting all of your eggs in one basket and opening stores across multiple providers even if they have identical items to help minimize these types of childish games that some feel the need to play.  And it could be worse.  You could have to deal with these problems yourself instead of having a team of people doing it for you.

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J.J. Jackson is President of Land of the Free Studios, Inc. and Cafepress “Top Shopkeeper”. He has been selling t-shirts on-line since 2004 and is the owner of the T-Shirt Entrepreneur, a site dedicated to helping people get involved in the T-shirt Economy. He is also the owner of Funny When Wet T-shirts, American Infidel Tshirts, Uber Gamer T-shirts as well as many other online t-shirt and gift stores.