One of the world's largest Internet portals suffered a world-class outage for several hours on Monday.

By Margaret Kane, ZDNet News UPDATED February 7, 2000 2:32 PM PT

Yahoo! Inc., one of the busiest sites on the Internet, experienced an approximately three-hour outage Monday, leaving Web surfers unable to reach the site.

Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) is the most-visited site on the Internet after America Online Inc., drawing more than 42 million unique visitors a month, according to research firm Media Metrix.

Observers said the site appeared to encounter problems at about 10:30 a.m. PST.

The site was back in operation by 1:30 p.m. PST, although some users continued to report difficulty in getting to certain features.

Yahoo spokeswoman Shannon Stubo confirmed the outage. She couldn't provide specific times when the problem occurred.

Stubo said the company had not yet identified the source of the problem.

The company said the outage did not appear to affect all parts of the site and that the e-mail service offered on the site continued working.

Yahoo delivers an average 465 million page views every day.

Officials at Keynote Systems, a San Mateo, Calif., firm that measures Internet performance and availability, said the Yahoo! site went down between 10:15 and 10:30 a.m. PST.

"We can't tell exactly why they're going down. The problem from the user point of view is a time-out -- the browser just spins and never responds properly," said Dan Todd, director of public services at Keynote.

Todd said the Yahoo! outage was unusual, since the portal site usually perform well in Keynote tests.

"They've been one of the best-performing sites everywhere," he said. "For roughly the last year Yahoo! has been in the top five of performance of these Web sites -- and typically performs at about 97 to 99 percent availability."

Todd said Keynote tests showed that Yahoo!'s problems seemed to be limited to the United States and that performance overseas was only down to about 60 percent availability.

Reuters contributed to this story.

http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2434093,00.html?chkpt=zdhpnews01

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), February 07, 2000

Answers

Hi Martin. You've probably heard by now that Yahoo's outage is attributed to the antics of hackers. Thanks for keeping abreast of the news!....

Hackers Attack Yahoo!

By Ted Bridis, Associated Press Writer

Monday, Feb. 7, 2000; 10:05 p.m. EST

WASHINGTON  Computer vandals using a common type of electronic attack overwhelmed Yahoo!, the most popular site on the Internet, and rendered the flagship Web directory inaccessible Monday for at least several hours.

Yahoo! Inc. spokeswoman Diane Hunt said the company, worth roughly $93 billion, was the victim of hackers flooding its equipment with repeated electronic requests. The vandals did not gain access inside its computers, she said.

The technique, called a denial of service attack, is similar to pranksters repeatedly dialing a company's telephone number to block all other incoming calls.

The failure drew renewed attention to the risks facing the fledgling world of electronic commerce, where hackers can shut down even the largest online stores.

"It basically says nobody is safe, if Yahoo can be taken down with all the resources behind them," said Elias Levy, chief technology officer at San Mateo, Calif.-based SecurityFocus.Com.

Another expert, though, said Yahoo's failure suggested the company was unprepared for such an attack on its systems. The Yahoo site is among the most robust on the Internet, delivering an average of 465 million Web pages to consumers each day.

"It's kind of silly it took so long," said James M. Atkinson, president and senior engineer at Granite Island Group, an Internet security consultant in Massachusetts. "The fact it went on for hours indicates a management and infrastructure problem that does not involve technology. This should have taken them off the map for 15 to 20 minutes, 30 at the most."

Hunt said technicians determined that a flood of data requests coming from different computers on the Internet had overwhelmed its routers, which help direct traffic for the Web site.

Technicians ultimately were able to identify the type of data and filter it out, which restored service.

She declined to say whether Yahoo had contacted the FBI, which coincidentally warned Web sites last month about a specific type of denial of service attack. The FBI could not be reached immediately for comment.

"Our first priority has been identifying what was happening and then installing the filters to enable our users to access our services," Hunt said.

The FBI suffered a similar attack on its own Web site last year. It made the site inaccessible for days in April 1999 after hackers overwhelmed its Internet computers also using a denial of service attack.

In its latest advisory, the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center said it was "highly concerned about the scale and significance of these reports," and vulnerabilities were "widespread, well-known and readily accessible on most networked systems."

Yahoo said the problems began Monday about 1:45 p.m. EST. The problem also prevented the company's customers from accessing free e-mail accounts through the Web site, but it didn't otherwise affect the flow of mail.

The problem also did not affect customers' home pages on Geocities, which is owned by Yahoo.

Media Metrix, which tracks visitors to Web sites, said www.yahoo.com was the most popular Internet site for the month of December, the latest figures available, when it recorded 36 million visitors.

Monday's attack didn't affect the company's stock. It traded close to where it had opened at nearly $353. Yahoo's market capitalization  the value of all its outstanding shares  is roughly $93 billion.

The Associated Press, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpos t.com/wp-srv/aponline/20000207/aponline220555_001.htm

-- Lee Maloney (leemaloney@hotmail.com), February 08, 2000.

There is a faint y2k relationship here, albeit ironic.

We expected Denial of Service attacks to increase over the rollover, that is one reason many organizations powered down (and therefore had zero problem). But the hackers seemed to obey Koskinen's request to chill over the rollover! Now that we're in February, the attacks are back

-- Bud Hamilton (budham@hotmail.com), February 08, 2000.