Tag Archives: Amazon

Twitter, Netflix, PayPal, Visa and More Go Down From Massive Cyber Attack, But We’re Still Up!

Crazy news today that some of the biggest sites on the internet are down today, but we’re still up with no downtime!

The sites that have been or are still down today include:

  1. PayPal
  2. Twitter
  3. Ebay
  4. Netflix
  5. Etsy
  6. Visa
  7. Reddit
  8. Github

+ MANY MORE

…And of course we can’t forget the target themselves, Dyn.com

This massive outage is the biggest in years, maybe the biggest ever, and is a result of a huge DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack on the Dynamic DNS provider company (Dyn) that they rely on to point their domain name to their sites and services.

MyStyle Cloud:  No Outages!

We use both Amazon and Rackspace services and experienced no outage at all. Props to our ops team, Rackspace infrastructure teams, and especially to Amazon AWS and for bouncing back from this attack FAST after Amazon was also hit. Even though Amazon’s retail site was reported to having some connectivity issues and downtime for their own well known Amazon.com retail site Friday morning, our services and uptime has been 100% through the storm, and we are happier than ever to be using their infrastructure. Great job Amazon AWS!

Amazon, Maybe the Most Experienced History of Dealing With DDoS

Perhaps their professional and super fast handling of the situation comes from their history having been one of the victims of some of one of the first really major mainstream DDoS attacks way back in 2000. They’ve been dealing with this sort of attack since then for over 15 years now, and also showed that experience in 2010 when Anonymous tried to take down their network after Amazon decided to cut off WikiLeaks from their services over leaked State Department documents. That attack showed the world that Amazon’s infrastructure was so massive it could actually handle the load of the attack, just like it handles the massive traffic of the holidays for millions of people every day.

Knowing this, DDoS attacks against Amazon are almost pointless, because if Anonymous can’t DDoS hard enough to take down Amazon, really almost nobody can.  So, this time the attackers targeted a service provider for DNS to cut off some of Amazon’s sites and many networks rather than attack the networks themselves.  The ironic part is that the company taken down that caused all of the sites’ outages, Dyn, provides this service as a way for these major sites IP addresses to always be changing, something that helps prevent these sort of attacks in the first place by frequently changing the address.  It’s a smart move on the attackers part, to go over these massive networks’ heads to cut off power right by the switch, so to speak, but Amazon has pivoted and handled the outage so quickly, that the strategy it doesn’t seem to have a lasting effect on them.  PayPal, Twitter, and many others are still down, however, even though they have massice technical resources, showing how good the Amazon Ops team and network really is.

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