Internet users in Northern California were unable to reach properties
including Amazon.com and Amazon Web Services for a time Wednesday evening, as
their DNS provider was targeted by a distributed denial-of-service attack. The
attack came as North American consumers rushed to finish online shopping ahead
of the end-of-year holiday season.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the first to signal something was amiss. Its
status page indicates that at 5:43 p.m. Pacific Time on Wednesday its staff was
investigating reports of DNS (Domain Name System) resolution errors from
customers trying to reach its S3 cloud storage service. The problem persisted
until 6:38 p.m. Pacific Time, but in the meantime the S3 service continued to
operate, AWS said.
