Amazon Says Hardware, Not Hackers, Caused Outage

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."

possible cause of failure

[bl8n8r]

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

I know one thing...

[digitaldc]

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

Managing Perceptions

[theshowmecanuck]

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.

Re:Managing Perceptions

[Rysc]

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?

Re:Yes but...

[Sonny Yatsen]

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.

wait

[marcello_dl]

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 :)

Re:possible cause of failure

[Anonymous Coward]

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.