Failure News & Articles

Amazon (news, site) may be one of the 200lb information gorillas in the cloud, but it's not immune to taking a good beating, as an unfortunate customer story shows.

Late last week a customer using Amazon's Web Services came under a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack from an unknown source. The target was code-hosting site Bitbucket who found its hosted information all but unavailable and its site inaccessible to customers.

Both Bitbucket and its customers were soon looking to Amazon for answers and none seemed forthcoming until the outage starting appearing on Twitter messages from various disgruntled members.

Amazon stalled when first contacted (clearly following step one of the customer support manual) but soon recognized and began to address the problem. It's good to see that during the outage, several hosting companies got in touch with Bitbucket to offer their services. Nothing like a crisis to see a firm reassess its priorities.

Over the weekend there were several waves of attack, followed by further downtime due to corruption of the company databases as a result of the attack. It turns out the site was being hammered by UDP packets, leaving genuine requests flailing in a sea of traffic.

To get the fine detail on this story, the Twitter feed of Bitbucket's chief, Jesper Noehr makes for interesting reading, as does the more detailed blog posts of the outage.

This story should act as a statutory warning to those who sign up to any online-only service. Perhaps wowed by the glossy brochure, the guarantee of 99.9% uptime and the promise of tech support from the head of computing himself, even on weekends -- nothing is perfect and always have a backup.

Alexa has been around since the dawn of Web time, well pretty much. This organization has seen it all.

Alexa was caught in the maelstrom of the greatest boom and bust since the Depression… and survived. The group enjoyed exceptional growth in a totally new business and technological environment, followed by a long and languid fall from eminence. It innovated like crazy, and its innovations reshaped the landscape of the Web. And it was subject to one of the Web’s first huge, headline-grabbing takeovers.

Latterly, Alexa has faced stinging criticism over its traffic measurement model, and has responded by going back to the drawing-board with a new model and a fresh attempt to resurrect itself as a relevant Web player.

The Alexa story is part cautionary tale, part glorious legend. This is that story in 26 letters.