Is housing.com hacked/down? India's Leading Startup | Hacker News Reader

Is housing.com hacked/down? India's Leading Startup

housing.com

45 pointsilluminek45 comments

If nothing else, the level of immaturity of conduct by housing.com's ex-CEO and his followers within the company is definitely hurting the burgeoning startup scene in India real bad. To make matters worse, this comes at a time when foreign VC firms/banks were only starting to get comfortable investing sizable amounts of money in Indian startups at a pre-profitability stage. My only hope is that the people in the tech community world over do not stereotype Indian startups to this one bad apple, and up and coming Indian entrepreneurs do not assume this is acceptable and normal.

I am surprised to see, that people are not able to redirect it to some decent maintenance page. What could have gone wrong at tech?

It pretty much looks like an inside job.

Surprising bit lies in some engineers working on the infra thinking it's cool to deface the company's site to show support for their fired CEO.

I just saw this today.

Rahul Yadav fired from Housing as "behavior not befitting a CEO"

http://e27.co/rahul-yadav-fired-housing-behaviour-not-befitt...

sure, it's perhaps a bit immature.

on the other hand, it's just another business out to make money -- like many others. there are more important things one could get upset about. let's not take things too seriously.

This story is interesting: http://qz.com/442399/timeline-the-rise-and-fall-of-rahul-yad...

Paints Sequoia Capital in a rather bad light.

Perhaps some users are unhappy with this:

https://www.techinasia.com/india-housing-ceo-released-by-boa... http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/01/rahul-yadav-fired-as-housin...

The sysadmins need to change the DNS to point to a status page, perform forensic dumps of the servers, and perform incident response 101 ASAP. There's no excuse leaving an attacker controlled message up for hours.

True. They seems helpless.

Or complicit. The message posted sounds like a plea to return the recently departed CEO to power, or am I misreading it?

Reading that I got a vibe of a "cry/message from the inside".

Yes, I am getting this as the page: http://i.imgur.com/Z0E2RVG.jpg

eek. plug in your laptop man!

I suspect this is an inside job of some of the employees

its not india's leading startup.

What is then?

Edit: Thanks for the feedback, I didn't know some of these (like VWO) were of Indian origin.

flipkart , olacabs , snapdeal , zomato ,etc. are also there , but it's definitely one of the leading ones

In addition to what linux_devil has mentioned, on the enterprise side there is Plivo, HackerRank, FreshDesk, Helpshift, Druva, RecruiterBox, Webengage, VisualWebsiteOptimizer etc.

adding to the above... browserstack.. my fav :D

It is back up again. But was surely done by some insider who supports the ex-CEO.

Now it's time. There is a new website up and running, you guys wanna check it out. http://housing.ceo/

Such a thing is really sad for Indian startup community.

I was expecting a little more maturity from "CEO"s!!!

Skeptical if that is actually him, his prior actions do indicate it's possible.

True that.

Is this the maintenance page or has it been hacked?

https://twitter.com/expresstechie/status/618010135181422592

Recent events @ housing.com look like a movie.

looks like hacked

BTW! It went down at around 4:15PM IST and came backup at 4:35PM IST for couple of minutes. After that same story.

If I am not wrong then there was a townhall meeting going on @ Mumbai headquarters when it all happened.

Interesting that there is no HTML just a direct link to an image.

Down again. For sure someone is playing with it.

very sad day for housing, I mean some scaling issues are fine but deface is catastrophic . Good luck to housing

It's even down at 5:20 PM IST

It is backup again now.

Still down at 6:00PM IST.

Steve Jobs lite

Its more than an hour and still down!

This may be an unpopular opinion but I think Rahul Yadav was made a scapegoat for all the VCs who put in too much money into housing at too high of a valuation. Yadav has his flaws -- but they are mostly childish, not evil. He gave the so-called adults a perfect excuse to hide behind but it still doesn't excuse the Board for their key decisions related to scaling, burn etc.

As for Rahul Yadav, I think he would have done well to find a person he really respects and to listen to him. Zuck did that with Andressen(no, I'm not saying he's Zuck; just that having a close mentor can really make a massive difference.) The Board could have helped here in lightly nudging him to find that somebody instead of engaging in constant confrontation.

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