Iconic auction house Christie’s was forced to set up an entirely new website for live auctions after its main domain was brought down by a highly disruptive cyberattack.
The company’s website shut down on Thursday night, a few days before it was planning on auctioning roughly $840 million worth of art. At press time, the website was still offline, with a temporary site being propped up in its place.
On this new site, Christie’s left this message for its visitors: “We apologize that our full website is currently offline. We are looking to resolve this as soon as possible and regret any inconvenience.”
Proceeding as planned
While the outage might be the result of a cyberattack in which hackers may have even stolen data, it’s worth mentioning that this might also have been a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Until Christie’s comes forward with more details, however, we can only speculate on the cause.
As the company’s IT team wrestles with the incident, a new site was set up to help facilitate upcoming auctions:
“Looking ahead, we are pleased to confirm all our live auctions this week will take place as scheduled, with the exception of the Rare Watches sale in Geneva that we postponed by one day to tomorrow, 14th May,” the company said in an updated statement.
“Our marketing teams have designed and built a new website environment to host content for our live auctions including sales information, catalogs and essays. Our Christie's YouTube channel is also available with virtually all our video content for this week’s Luxury and 20/21 sales, as well as our other social media channels. While our usual website remains offline, our clients will be able to bid securely in person, on the phone, by absentee bid and online via Christie’s LIVE.”
Via The Register
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