Amazon "under attack" as site suffers outages

 

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Posted on 10 Jun 2008 at 08:39

Amazon has been hit by outages on both its US and UK websites as speculation mounts that the sites have come under attack.

Amazon's US website was taken out of service for a couple of hours on Friday, while a fresh round of outages yesterday morning left both the US and UK websites out of action for around an hour.

Visitors to the site were met with an error message saying: "We're sorry - An error occurred while we tried to process your request."

Website traffic analysts, Narus, have speculated that the downtime may have been caused by a sustained attack on the Amazon-owned Internet Movie Database (IMDB).

"This attack coincided with the downtime for Amazon, beginning at 10:30 PDT and continued for about 1 hour and 10 minutes," Narus's chief technology officer, Dr Antonio Nucci writes on his blog. "The attack itself was interesting in that the attacker seemed to open multiple connections with the IMDB's web server (port 80) while incrementing his source port for every new connection.

"The attack's average rate was 3 Mb/sec, certainly not large enough to cause a complete meltdown but probably good enough to delay the legit users. However, there might have been other attacks launched at the same time on IMDB which weren't in the path of our probes."

Others claim there is nothing malicious in the outages. "It stills look like some type of user error or configuration glitch," a spokesman for website monitoring firm Keynote Systems told CNet.com. "The data just doesn't demonstrate any kind of network-level attack."

Amazon's UK website boasts of a new redesign, which could possibly be the culprit.

Amazon was unavailable for comment at the time of writing.

Author: Barry Collins