There was some speculation why IMC Germany was down on last Tuesday. This was not due to an "internal problem" but an attack from outside.

Between 18:00 and 22:30 hours indy.de was subject to a "denial of service attack" and admin decided to take IMC Germany off the net to avoid harm to data and system.

The source of the attack could not be identified.

"A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of the concerted, malevolent efforts of a person or persons to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely. Perpetrators of DoS attacks typically target sites or services hosted on high-profile web servers such as banks, credit card payment gateways, and even root nameservers."*

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack