Last-minute Amazon, Wal-Mart shoppers delayed by DDoS attack

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If you were one of the many Internet users trying to beat the clock with holiday shopping on Wednesday, a DNS attack may have tried to spoil your plans. Users found themselves unable to access several major websites, including Amazon.com and Wal-Mart.com, during part of the day yesterday, which Amazon's DNS provider reported was a result of a DDoS attack.

The DNS attack started late in the day on Wednesday and took place against UltraDNS, the company that provides DNS services to the aforementioned sites. UltraDNS' parent company, Neustar, said that the attack affected the company's facilities in San Jose and Palo Alto, and the effects were largely limited to California users trying to access those sites. The company confirmed that an "abnormal spike in queries" took place and that it was identified as a DDoS attack.

The outage affected other parts of Amazon's Web Services in the US, but apparently not overseas. This, according to a retweet from Amazon Web "Strategist" Jeff Bar, included S3 and EC2. Luckily for Amazon and other e-commerce sites, they were only down for about an hour, but some shoppers still found themselves out of luck as a result of the outage.

As noted by CNET, this isn't the first time this year that Amazon and UltraDNS were affected by a DDoS attack. In April, a much larger attack took Amazon, SalesForce, and PetCo offline and affected a much larger number of customers. Still, with retailers struggling for decent numbers this holiday season, even an hour in one part of the country can mean much more than a minor annoyance.

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