A domain name outage Tuesday morning that left many popular Web sites, including those of Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Apple, temporarily inaccessible was the result of an Internet attack, according to Web infrastructure company Akamai.
The attack caused problems for more than two hours--from 5:30 a.m. to 7:45 a.m. PDT. Many of the world's most popular sites suffered from widespread outages, according to Keynote Systems, which compiles statistics related to Web surfing. On a typical day, the top 40 sites measured by Keynote rarely dip below 99 percent availability. On Tuesday, however, Keynote saw availability drop to 81 percent.
Where the attack struck first has yet to be determined, and the affected companies are pointing to others, not themselves. An attack on Akamai could have rippled out to Google and the other sites, or those sites might have been individually targeted, which in turn could have put pressure on a key Internet service that Akamai runs.
An Akamai spokesman said it noticed an attack against four unnamed "customers" that rendered their sites inaccessible. Akamai said the strike against those customers in turn caused a failure of its own domain name server (DNS) system, which translates word-based URLs into numeric Web addresses to link surfers to company sites.
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