Amazon hit with DDoS attack Wednesday

UltraDNS, the DNS provider for Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Northern California, briefly went offline Thursday due to a reported Denial of Service (DoS) attack. Specifically, their S3 cloud storage service was unreachable from about 5:43 pm to 6:38 pm Pacific Time. While the service itself continued to operate, users in that area received DNS resolution errors.

AWS quickly bounced back from the attack and indicated that they had everything under control.

“At 7:45 p.m. Eastern Time we noticed an abnormal spike in queries and immediately identified it as a DDoS attack,” said Allen Goldberg, vice president of corporate communications at Neustar, in an e-mail.

“We had everything under control well under an hour. The attack was limited to Northern California Internet users,” he said.

One of the concerns raised about cloud computing, of which Amazon.com is a major provider, is whether it can be reliable to business customers who need their services to stay live as much as possible. Proponents would argue that companies like Amazon.com are better prepared for such strikes and are thus able to recover more quickly than the average business with its own internal web applications.

Source: Flickr
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