Before the celebrations, shopping sites in Northern California were affected by an attack from DDoS service outage.
Neustar Inc. runs UltraDNS service provides DNS service to Amazon.com and Amazon Web Services. The sites were blocked because their DNS provider Neustar was hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on Wednesday.
During the denial-of-service attack, web surfers in Silicon Valley and other parts of northern California received an error message or delayed response from multiple websites that used the UltraDNS directory service.
Allen Goldberg, spokesperson of Neustar said that “The Company was able to analyze the attack pattern and take steps to limit its effects within minutes of identifying the problem. We had everything under control well under an hour. The attack was limited to Northern California Internet users”.
Other AWS cloud services in North America experienced similar problems, including the Virginia and Northern California data centers hosting EC2, the Elastic Compute Cloud. The company’s SimpleDB and Simple Queue Service servers, and all AWS servers in Ireland, were unaffected by the DNS problem.