A significant distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack lasting approximately eight hours affected Amazon Web Services yesterday, knocking its S3 service and other services offline between 10:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. PDT.

The attack struck AWS's Router 53 DNS Web service, which led to outages for other services that require public DNS resolution: Elastic Load Balancing, Relational Database Service, and Elastic Compute Cloud. AWS alerted customers while the attack was ongoing to inform them of "intermittent errors with resolution of some AWS DNS names." Starting at 5:16 p.m., a small number of specific DNS names experienced a higher error rate. The issues have been resolved.

Amazon says its Shield Advanced DDoS mitigation tool helped in managing the attack; however, some users were unable to connect because it categorized legitimate customer queries as malicious.

Around the same time as the AWS attack, Google Cloud Platform also experienced a range of problems. It's believed the incidents are separate; GCP claims its issue was unrelated to DDoS.

Read more details here.

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