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Amazon Says Hardware, Not Hackers, Caused Outage

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the finger-pointing dept.

ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "Amazon has denied reports that its European sites were brought down by a DoS attack by a hacker group sympathetic to Wikileaks cause. The retailer was a planned target for the attackers, called Anonymous. But Amazon said it was a hardware failure in its European data centre network that caused the half hour outage in Europe."

27 of 128 comments (clear)

  1. I don't know by zero.kalvin · · Score: 2

    I believe them on this one.

    1. Re:I don't know by Haedrian · · Score: 3, Informative

      I'm sure I do. DDOSing Amazon would require a hell of a lot of clients.

      And Anonymous themselves said they weren't going to attack Amazon.

    2. Re:I don't know by Errol+backfiring · · Score: 4, Funny

      In fact, a whole cloud of them.

      --
      Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
    3. Re:I don't know by Weezul · · Score: 2

      Amazon is currently hosting wikileaks for a Danish media group, just not for wikileaks themselves.

      I've a quick question for all the network gurus out there. The JS LOIC stops sending packets once the currently open connections without responses reaches a preset limit, which happens to be 1000.

      Is that really how one should approach a DDoS? Would doing otherwise be a SYN flood which kernels now block fairly effectively? Or are they perhaps doing this to make it more like a virtual sit-in, i.e. all the computers play nice but still suck up time?

      You'll notice for example that verified.visa.com:80 hangs around 1001 for several seconds.

      Sorry if the question is stupid. I've never cared too much about networking details, especially related to silly DDoS attacks, but all the media talk about wikileaks made me curious just what people were doing.

      --
      The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
  2. possible cause of failure by bl8n8r · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Load from the DDoS traffic fried the switch.  So you see, it's a hardware failure.

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    1. Re:possible cause of failure by gilbert644 · · Score: 2

      DDoS attacks were aimed at amazon.com, i.e. US infrastructure so I doubt it.

    2. Re:possible cause of failure by datapharmer · · Score: 2

      Heat.

      It is why we air condition data centers.

      --
      Get a web developer
    3. Re:possible cause of failure by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You quite overestimate the hardware. Switches do fail, overheat, etc, it happens all the "F." time.
      There's always some which are less tolerant than the others. Especially when it's really big, complicated hardware.

      Welcome to the real world.

    4. Re:possible cause of failure by Opportunist · · Score: 3, Funny

      You don't watch many action movies, do you? From them I learned that you can even make computers explode by things like entering the wrong password or just hitting the wrong key. And they also throw you halfway across the room when they blow up in sparkles.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    5. Re:possible cause of failure by Noughmad · · Score: 2

      Heat.

      It is why we air condition data centers.

      Uh huh. And these digital routers just keep revving up more and more as data comes through until they catch fire?

      I was just wondering why my processor never overheats, and now I know it's because it's digital.

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  3. I know one thing... by digitaldc · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...you can't believe anything you read about outages any more.

    --
    He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
  4. Managing Perceptions by theshowmecanuck · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Whether true or not, Amazon pretty much has to say it was something other than a DDoS that impacted their site(s). It would be bad for business to say that an attack from a bunch of hackers can impact them negatively in any serious way. They have to maintain this "strong" outward face to their clients to maintain their level of trust. Given that Amazon did suffer some sort of outage or reduced service during the time period, I'm not sure of anything other than a trusted third party investigation to understand what level of effect the DDoS 'attack' had (if any) on Amazon. I'm not saying there isn't a way, I just don't know of one. Maybe someone can suggest one.

    --
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    1. Re:Managing Perceptions by Rysc · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It would also be bad for business to say "We weren't attacked, we just suck at doing our jobs." This is precisely what hardware-related outages mean for an outfit like Amazon. Why would you trust your business to Amazon hosted services when they are incompetent?

      --
      I want my Cowboyneal
  5. Beginning of the End of DDoS? by Notquitecajun · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I wonder if the recent WL issues signal the end of DDoS for at least large companies - Visa, Mastercard, Amazon, etc. I can foresee them putting enough money into their servers and infrastructure that, at some point, they really couldn't be overwhelmed. Is this going to wind up being a hardware or software issue in the future in preventing DDoS attacks?

    1. Re:Beginning of the End of DDoS? by nicholas22 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      It all depends on the actual DDoS load. There's no such thing as infinite bandwidth, you see. Amazon was down for 30 minutes in 4 countries on Sunday. And this by some quasi-organized group of script kiddies. So no, I don't see that being the case yet at all...

    2. Re:Beginning of the End of DDoS? by N1AK · · Score: 2

      Load sharing between groups of large companies could be one potential counter-tactic. I'm not a network expert, so I'm not even going to try and elaborate on the concept, however I doubt it's beyond the wit of man to implement.

  6. Re:Yes but... by Sonny+Yatsen · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You post on slashdot and you pay attention to the news. I seriously doubt you fit into the category of "average customer".

    I believe you'd find that the "average customer" doesn't share the "hate" that you suddenly gained, but are rather quite apathetic about the whole thing so long as they can get a cheap Playstation 3.

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  7. wait by marcello_dl · · Score: 4, Insightful

    A hardware failure bringing down the site of a corporation who also is a cloud provider it's pretty bad PR, there should be no single point of failure in a proper cloudy system :)

    --
    ---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
    1. Re:wait by dragonhunter21 · · Score: 2

      I think it's better to have a system that might suffer from hardware failures than a system that can be taken down by a group of loosely-organized script kiddies.

      Take a small PR hit to mitigate a larger one? Sounds like a plan to me.

      --
      Sent from my CR-48
  8. "The cloud you can depend on" by holamundo · · Score: 2

    That's what they told us.

    Quoting from their site: "Reliable and redundant – Our datacenter is built using large amounts of commodity hardware. When one node fails, millions of other nodes pick up the slack. As a result, you gain all the benefits of an always-on and self-healing infrastructure, without ever having to configure or replace hardware."

    So how did "a" hardware failure brought their cloud down? Anyway, a hardware failure still sounds better than a DDoS though.

    1. Re:"The cloud you can depend on" by Ash-Fox · · Score: 2

      So how did "a" hardware failure brought their cloud down?

      If you were using Amazon's cloudfront service, it would have automatically redirected traffic through a non-European data center instead, so it was only really down for those who chose to do S3 only without cloudfront.

      --
      Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
  9. Re:Yes but... by Lumpy · · Score: 5, Informative

    I agree, back in 1776 a bunch of evil weasels took over the colonies and look at what happened. a lot of innocent British soldiers sent over to protect the citizens died!

    One man's TERRORIST is another mans Freedom Fighter.

    --
    Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
  10. Re:Damn you Amazon. by Dan+Dankleton · · Score: 2

    You mean it's a DDoS of the postal service?

  11. Re:Yes but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I agree, back in 1776 a bunch of evil weasels took over the colonies and look at what happened. a lot of innocent British soldiers sent over to protect the citizens died!

    On their first terrorist attack, they cowardly disguised themselves to put the blame on innocent Native Americans. If they had succeeded, they could have caused an Indian massacre by the British.

  12. Re:Anonymous themselves said they weren't going to by ArsenneLupin · · Score: 2

    In order to stay "technically" legal, the group can't openly call for an illegal action, such as DDosing of a target. So they instead say "hopefully nobody will DDos target", and hope that everybody understands what is really meant...

  13. Re:Yes but... by gestalt_n_pepper · · Score: 2

    Moral relativism exists, like it or not. Morality != (something objectively verifiable)

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    Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
  14. Re:Yes but... by Noughmad · · Score: 2

    If they had succeeded, they could have caused an Indian massacre by the British.

    They didn't fail completely though, the British got their revenge on the other Indians.

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