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        Wired News

        Routers Blamed for Yahoo Outage

        by Declan McCullagh and Joanna Glasner

        5:00 p.m. 7.Feb.2000 PST

        Most of the Yahoo network was unreachable for three hours on
        Monday as the company weathered what it described as a
        widespread malicious attack on its Web sites.

        Attackers reportedly laid siege to the Internet's second most
        popular destination at about 10:30 a.m. PST, snarling Yahoo's
        internal network and denying millions of visitors access to
        mail, schedules, and the directory service.

        An engineer at another company that receives Internet access
        from the same provider, Global Center, told Wired News the
        outage was due to misconfigured equipment.

        The person, who asked to remain anonymous, said that his firm
        also lost connectivity through Global Center's Sunnyvale,
        California, facility during the same time period due to apparent
        router problems, not hacker attacks.

        Details remained sketchy, with service provider Global Center
        blaming an intentional surge in traffic and Yahoo claiming a
        cadre of as-yet-unknown vandals fouled their system. No Web
        content appeared to have been altered or deleted.

        A Yahoo spokesperson called it a "coordinated distributed denial
        of service attack" against the company's San Francisco Bay Area
        data centers that originated from multiple places at the same
        time. The representative said the outage caused an "intermittent
        ability to access some, but not all, of our services."

        But the offline sites rank among the most prominent. Yahoo's
        highly visible yahoo.com, broadcast.com, and my.yahoo.com sites
        were unreachable, although some other properties such as
        Geocities remained unaffected.

        A likely explanation: Geocities receives its connection from
        Exodus, while the yahoo.com and other affected sites connect to
        the Internet through Global Center.

        "The Global Center network is not down. There've been no fiber
        cuts... This is a specific attack on Yahoo by external forces,"
        said Secret Fenton, a spokeswoman for Global Center. "This
        affected accessibility to Yahoo, [which] hosts servers for its
        site at Global Center."

        Global Center -- formerly FrontierNet -- is owned by Global
        Crossing, a Bermuda telecommuniations firm. Other Global Center
        customers, such as Ziff Davis, MP3.com, and eToys.com, did not
        report any glitches.

        Neither Yahoo nor Global Center representatives provided
        technical details, but the snafu seemed to originate with a
        router, and experts began speculating on what could have been
        the cause.

        Jeff Schiller, MIT's network manager, said that a denial of
        service attack could be mistaken for router failure at first.

        "They might have thought they had a bad card in a router, and
        they shut down the router and replaced the card, and the problem
        didn't go away," Schiller said. "They probably replaced
        equipment and then discovered that it didn't solve the problem."

        Schiller speculated that any assault might have been a "Tribal
        Flood Network" attack. "If this is a denial of service attack,
        this is the one of the first attacks against a public business."

        The outage had the unusual effect of boosting the companies'
        shares. Global Crossing closed Monday at 50 5/16, up 1 1/8.
        Yahoo ended at 354, up half a point.

        On the Motley Fool discussion groups, investors kvetched that
        they couldn't access their mail, news, or movie info -- while
        scratching their heads over the apparent non-effect of the
        snafu. "Usually, when a portal has an outage the stock price
        goes down. Yahoo is holding up surprisingly well," one person
        wrote.

        Keynote Systems, an Internet monitoring firm, said the Yahoo
        outage began between 10:15 and 10:30 a.m. (PST).

        According to Media Metrix, only America Online reaches more
        people online than Yahoo.

        http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,34178,00.html


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