I'll investigate now, but not sure what might be causing that.
As you can imagine, mitigating DDOS on a nameserver is tricky due to the nature of the requests coming in - harder to Deep Packet Inspect and scrub, or easily identify patterns of bad traffic access to zero-route.
We learn and move on. I wonder how many other startups are going as far as using DNS from multiple providers? I still see many startups using Go Daddy for their DNS... :/
a) They don't know as much about WP as they ought to.
b) Their service is bad. Even Bluehost/Dreamhost can take heavy traffic without problem when WP is set-up properly.
They went home, it works from their home ISP. We're not seeing any other reports of downtime or unavailability across any of our monitoring. No one else here is reporting "down for me too".
The fact that our site was unavilable for them on their university campus, while still concerning, hardly equates to "we don't know much about WordPress" or "our service is bad".
And "terrifying"... really?
Except for the other person who complained in the responses about uptime.
Or the tweets from people reporting that their site is down, and your site is down: https://twitter.com/#!/search/%40wpengine%20down
"And "terrifying"... really?"
When you get hit with a heavy load and go down, it is an huge issue for a web business. The whole point is to drive large amounts of traffic, and so if a marketing campaign is successful you're paying for nothing.
Apparently you don't think that web based businesses having downtime is an issue. Worse yet, your casual and downright confrontational attitude when confronted with actual evidence.
So, yes, WPEngine...terrifying.
Put yourself in their shoes for a minute, and try building a company that is pushing tech boundaries.
Not saying you aren't, but based on your tone it would indicate that a) You don't know what it's like to roll out something that generates a lot of interest in a short-period of time, or b) Have forgotten what it's like to be in that situation.
No matter how prepared you are, dealing with a huge burst of traffic in a very short period of time is the quintessential "hard problem" for web developers - especially in modern web businesses where anything can cause the site to slow (e.g. an expired cache on a node on a CDN that happens to be slow/down during the window you launched, that also happens to be serving some asset other aspects of your site rely on - css/js/etc.).
Even Google, Amazon & Apple, who have boatloads of cash and hundreds of man-decades of experience building web infrastructure still have issues like this on a launch day.
So cut them some slack.
When it's your turn to be in that position, we will do our best to return the favor.