Amazon.com is currently offline. No ETA on when it'll return, but it's safe to say this wasn't a scheduled outage. (Amazon.com)
UPDATE 3: The site is back up and operational now after 90 minutes of downtime. AdAge estimates that Amazon lost $1.8 million in revenue, but that's the textbook definition of a shot in the dark. We'll see what Amazon has to say about this outage if and when they address it. For now though, happy shopping!
Amazon put out a small notice to third-party resellers about the "un-planned event", but nothing on its media page.
UPDATE 2: The problem is starting to be resolved. Now we the below error message when visiting Amazon.com.
UPDATE: It looks like it could be a DNS issue. It looks like Amazon's DNS entry got hacked. Here's what results from a Whois search for Amazon.com:
Smokey:~ jlgolson$ whois amazon.com
Whois Server Version 2.0
Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.
AMAZON.COM.ZZZZZ.GET.LAID.AT.WWW.SWINGINGCOMMUNITY.COM
AMAZON.COM.MORE.INFO.AT.WWW.BEYONDWHOIS.COM
AMAZON.COM.IS.N0T.AS.1337.AS.WWW.GULLI.COM
AMAZON.COM
To single out one record, look it up with "xxx", where xxx is one of the
of the records displayed above. If the records are the same, look them up
with "=xxx" to receive a full display for each record.
>>> Last update of whois database: Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:35:00 EDT <<<
Yes, the commenters are right. It's not DNS that caused it. Three lashes for me.
Comments
your "update" with conjecture that it's DNS based is really, really uninformed.
try your "whois" test with microsoft.com or apple.com ... it's the same thing.
your awareness of how the version of the "whois" command operates is the only thing that's been compromised.
So, what does "whois www.amazon.com" give you? And why would you say those results indicate Amazon's DNS entry was hacked??
It's responding with a web server error message -- the DNS didn't get hacked... it resolves just fine if you ping it.
You can also access the Amazon website through HTTPS --> https://www.amazon.com/
There's unconfirmed talk about this being tied into a DDoS attack, according to InformationWeek.
Ian Lamont
Managing Editor
The Industry Standard
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