PermaLink Amazon's Self-inflicted Turkey Day DoS Attack11/23/2006 07:47 PM
Amazon decided to try something new this year with their Customers Vote Event.  Customers basically get to choose the heavily discounted item of the week.  This week, it was an Xbox360 for $100 instead of $299 regular price.  At 2pm EST on Thanksgiving Day, people would hit the site for one of 1000 units available.

The end result, as you may have guessed, was a 15-20min self-inflicted Denial Of Service attack. Most people couldn't even get a page to show up for 10-15min. Given that Amazon has probably the biggest e-commerce infrastructure in the world (even if it is based on an ancient IIS ISAPI DLL ;-), this is clearly pathetic performance, which begs the question: is any e-commerce site able to survive having millions of people in virtual "line" at their doors? :-P
It's definitely a clever way to test out your infrastructure to see what the weak points are. I just hope Amazon is willing to share the results with us...

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Full-stack developer (consultant) working with .Net, Java, Android, Javascript (jQuery, Meteor.js, AngularJS), Lotus Domino