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UltraDNS

DDoS attack hobbles major sites, including Amazon

An attack directed at the DNS provider for some of the Internet's larger e-commerce companies--including Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Expedia--took several Internet shopping sites offline Wednesday evening, two days before Christmas.

Neustar, the company that provides DNS services under the UltraDNS brand name, confirmed an attack took place Wednesday afternoon, taking out sites or rendering them extremely sluggish for about an hour. A representative who answered the customer support line said the attacks were directed against Neustar facilities in Palo Alto and San Jose, Calif., and Allen Goldberg, vice president of corporate communications for Neustar, confirmed that at about 4:… Read more

Web staggers under pre-Christmas DDoS attack

Editor's note: This post was continuously updated as this story developed. For a more complete account of what happened, see our followup story here.

Update: A customer support representative for NeuStar, the company that provides the UltraDNS service, confirms the outage was the result of a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack. More details below.

Procrastinators, beware: Amazon.com and a host of Internet shopping sites are having trouble Wednesday evening.

Two days before Christmas is likely not the best time for Amazon to go down, but at some point around 5 p.m. PST Wednesday evening, Amazon was … Read more