Yesterday evening there were initial reports that Amazon AWS was having issues. Turns out there was a massive DDOS attack against one of the major DNS providers on the west coast.
Interesting to see in the twittering from folks assuming it was a cloud failure at AWS. This is the sort of thing that cloud-hating IT departments will seize upon in their futile attempt to delay their inevitable transformation into cloud managers instead of procurers and installers of physical racks and boxes.
In fact, many websites that use Neustar as their DNS provider were reported as effectively unavailable, including Walmart, Target, and Salesforce.
Still, one would expect as important a player as Neustar in the DNS space to not have suffered such a crash, even under such trying circumstances. It would certainly be interesting tto be a fly on the wall in the “conversations” Neustar must be having with Amazon, Target, etc.
Related links of interest:
- CNET: “Web staggers” seems a bit overblown, but the article is informative:
- PC World is more accurate “Hits Briefly”, but there is misinformation in the article, including the fact that it was limited to Northern California users. I can tell you sitting in Seattle that this was a wider event than that.
Let me know of any other worthwhile reporting on this and I’ll add the links.
-bw