Amazon down today, took IMDB down along with it
June 6th, 2008by Supranamaya Ranjan
Amazon suffered an outage today starting 10:30 am PST. For a few hours the main page of Amazon seemed inaccessible and users would get an error message ‘HTTP/1.1 Service Not Available’. There are reports though that users are now able to access the site since 1:30 pm PST.
Using NarusInsight Secure Suite, we are continuing to investigate whether this outage was a result of a network-initiated attack against Amazon. Preliminary analysis doesn’t suggest any Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack or any other foul play against the main web site.
Contrary to emerging reports that sites that use Amazon Web Services (AWS) do seem to be running well, we’ve seen that IMDB (Internet Movie DataBase) does appear to have been affected by the outage. My preliminary analysis using NarusInsight Secure Suite shows that at least one of the ip-addresses used to host IMDB was under a sustained denial-of-service attack. My attempt to load the IMDB page via a direct connection to the web server under attack (http://72.21.206.70/) doesn’t load the images at all. It becomes interesting when you realize that IMDB seems to be hosted using Amazon Web Service (AWS) since this ip-address is registered as belonging to Amazon.
Stay tuned, as we would continue with the forensics and be back with more details.
[Update on the IMDB attack at 3:30 pm PST June 06 2008]
This attack coincided with the downtime for Amazon, beginning at 10:30 PDT and continued for about 1 hour and 10 minutes. The attack itself was interesting in that the attacker seemed to open multiple connections with the IMDB’s web server (port 80) while incrementing his source port for every new connection. The attack’s average rate was 3 Mbits/sec, certainly not large enough to cause a complete meltdown but probably good enough to delay the legit users. However, there might have been other attacks launched at the same time on IMDB which weren’t in the path of our probes. If any one else has heard anything else about IMDB’s outage, please comment.
[Update on the Amazon outage at 10:30 am PST June 09 2008]
Seems that Amazon.com suffered another outage Monday June 9th morning. This time the access problem is intermittent. I was unable to access one of the web server ip-addresses at all directly (http://72.21.210.11) while the other two (http://72.21.206.5/ and http://72.21.203.1/) do display content normally.