A "massive" distributed-denial-of-service attack emanating from China has taken down 123-reg, the UK net biz that hosts 1.4 million websites.

In a statement on the its service status page just after midday today, 123-reg blamed attackers in China:

From 11:30 to 22:50 our network was undergoing a massive distributed denial of service attack from China. Due to the nature and size of this attack the firewall systems in place needed to be reconfigured to block the bad traffic and allow the good traffic through.

The attack, which appears to be ongoing, caused patchy service from the sites hosted by the company, which also has more than 4 million domains on its books. 123-reg promised that no emails would be lost, and messages would be queued up by the mail servers and sent shortly.

123-reg's own site was down too in the aftermath of the traffic blast, which proved to be frustrating for users trying to find out what was going on. A 123-reg tweet at 12.30pm said that they were working through final issues and that services should be returning to normal.

123-reg is a brand name of Webfusion Ltd, part of the Host Europe group. WebFusion isn't picking up the phone so we can't get more detail on the hacks at this time. ®

Updated to add

A spokeswoman for 123-reg got in touch this afternoon to say:

We had contained the primary attack within 15 minutes of it happening. As the largest domain provider in the UK, and coupled with the increase of these types of attacks across Europe in particular, we know we are a prime target. We are still in the process of resolving this.