UltraDNS Outage - Snagged Shopping on Christmas Eve

Are you one of those hard-hit Amazon shopaholics who were baffled yesterday why your online purchase got hitched? Then you got to be a Northern Californian brushed with a stroke of ill luck on the Christmas eve. If you are curious as to whether it was a planned sabotage or a bug capsizing the UltraDNS,...

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let me tell you that it was plain and simple an UltraDNS outage.

The Denial of Service attack hit the UltraDNS hard. Consequently, all the transactions got zapped in a split of second. But thanks to the Yuletide spirit, it lasted only for an hour before the Amazon UltraDNS was restored to normal.

It is laborious task to actually estimate how much loss Amazon has had incurred due to the UltraDNS outage. Due to the DNS server blackout the online shoppers from California, San Jose nodal points suffered a complete deadlock in their proceedings. Amazon's store, EC2 system as well as the Simple Storage Service or S3 had the speed of a snail or hardly responded to the requesters to complete their transactions.

When the world was gearing up for the pre-Christmas bonanza, the way Amazon as well as the others in the league like Walmart, Gap, Linden Labs, Expedia, Salesforce became bonkers in a ziffy was actually erratic. A peculiar alarm gonged and a host of websites went offline with a bang, one of the insiders of amazon web services was heard speculating.

With an urgency the malignant attack was detected by the Neustar systems, and filtering was applied to waive off the intensity the attack. Well past midnight, the strike that knocked down the systems, could be controlled by the net gurus. Later, they lunged into the problem to espy the root cause of such a web hijack. 

 
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