A three-hour outage today on Yahoo was the result of a
malicious attack intentionally aimed at disabling the service, according to
company executives.
Yahoo president Jeff Mallett said a "distributed denial of service attack"
overwhelmed its Web hosting company's routers beginning at around 10:20
a.m. PST, and apparently ending shortly after 1 p.m. PST.
"It appears to be a coordinated outside attack on Yahoo routers here in
California in our main data centers," Mallett said in an interview.
A denial of service attack is increasingly becoming a common networking
prank. By deluging a Web site's equipment with too many requests for
information, an attacker can effectively clog the system, slowing
performance or altogether crashing the site. (See related story.)
These pranks have generally targeted much smaller sites to date. But
Yahoo's outage today shows that even Internet giants with ostensibly
enormous networking resources are not immune from such attacks.
GlobalCenter, the Web hosting unit of international communications carrier
Global Crossing, hosts the majority of Yahoo's Web sites, with the exception
of recently acquired properties such as GeoCities and Broadcast.com.
"As quickly and as early as possible we worked alongside with (Yahoo) to get
them up and running again," said a GlobalCenter spokeswoman.
GlobalCenter's network was not affected and no other Web sites
hosted by the company were impacted, the spokeswoman added.
According to one Internet performance measurement firm, Keynote Systems,
the problem primarily affected Yahoo users in the United States.
Keynote director of public services Dan Todd said Yahoo was inaccessible
within the United States, but was 59 percent accessible internationally.
Today's outage illustrates vulnerabilities in the technology supporting
Internet businesses. Yahoo attracts millions of visitors and serves as the
gateway to many other Web sites.
When it released its earnings report for the last three months of 1999,
Yahoo noted that it is accessed by 120 million unique vistors and that it
served an average of 465 million pages each day during December.
It was unclear how much Yahoo's competitors benefited from the temporary
outage, if at all.
A spokesman for rival portal AltaVista, for example, said the company's
network saw above average traffic this morning, but added the numbers were
not all that dramatic.
"We're not sure really what we can attribute (the uptick) to," said
spokesman David Emanuel. "It's not completely outside the normal parameters
for ups and downs."
Representatives from Lycos today said the site experienced an "unusual
traffic spike" while Yahoo was down, according to Ron Sege, executive vice
president of Lycos.
"We've seen a significant increase in traffic this afternoon," Sege said.
Mallet said most of Yahoo's services were affected by the attack. However,
certain sites, such as Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Shopping, and Yahoo Search and
Directory were up and running at certain points.
Mallet said that the company plans to investigate the origin of the attacks.
"It did not come from one single point," Mallett said. "It appears to have
come in from multiple servers simultaneously."
News.com's Stefanie Olsen and Corey Grice contributed to this report.
Web giant is spending $120 million to beef up its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, according to filings with the city reviewed by the San Jose Mercury News.
Tor's "obfsproxy" technology would make encrypted data look innocuous and let it dodge government censors. That could help citizens in Iran reach blocked sites as antigovernment protests reportedly loom.
MIT creates a simulation to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Spacewar. A relic of the early days of minicomputers, it was one of the first computer video games and set the stage for many others, including Asteroids.
George Lucas has just released his version of "Star Wars" in 3D, but c'mon--the guy believes Greedo shot first. Why not make your own Star Wars world? In the first installment of a Crave series, a crack team of crafters fight the power and turn paper bags into the Rebel Alliance's Admiral Ackbar. It's a sack!
