December 26, 2009
By the ZippyCart Shopping Carts Content Team
Internet users in the Silicon Valley and other parts of Northern California were unable to to view numerous ecommerce websites Wednesday night due to a denial of service attack. This DoS attack started around 4:45 p.m. on the West Coast when a rush of web traffic was noticed hitting servers at Neustar Inc., who runs UltraDNS. What typically happens during a DoS attack is someone decides to hit certain websites or high profile web services hosted on a particular server with an overload of traffic. When a server of a big site has an overload of illegitimate traffic it makes it very tough for it to be able to work for those real users trying to visit the site and shop. Many of the sites hit in this DoS attack Wednesday night were those run by Amazon.com, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.
In this DoS attack, the perpetrators made it so that users in and around Silicon Valley would get an error message when trying to load a site or it would take a really long time for the site to load if it was part of UltraDNS. The exact root of the DoS attack and who did it are still under investigation by Neustar Inc. at this time. They also would not confirm the full list of websites that were affected by the attack. During this peak time when users are trying to shop online for last minute deals it is crucial that these ecommerce sites stay live at all times to try and capture sales. Granted this attack came at the end of the holiday shopping season, but still yesterday was a busy day for shopping online. Hopefully ecommerce sites will not see anything like that as they prepare for after Christmas sales and specials to try and close out the year on a high note.
Amy is the co-founder of ZippyCart. She went to school for film in Cleveland, Ohio and ended up working in the field of viral video marketing, which eventually led her to her real profession: SEO. When she's not writing for ZippyCart, she can be found out and about Seattle, WA.
