Security News > 2001 > January > FC: Why all Microsoft sites went offline today: Some theories
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2001 18:13:06 -0500 From: Declan McCullagh To: politech () politechbot com Subject: FC: Why all Microsoft sites went offline today: Some theories Here's one more development... Less than an hour ago, ping requests sent to the four Microsoft-wide name servers stopped working: 57 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, +1 errors, 100% packet loss Pings throughout the day showed high -- but not 100 percent -- packet loss. At 11:20 ET I was getting zero packet loss. At 5 pm ET: 59 packets transmitted, 19 packets received, 67% packet loss I also can no longer get through to microsoft.com web site -- even though I could earlier -- using its 207.46.230.218 address: 22 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss This could be evidence of a DDOS attack, Microsoft disabling ping responses, a natural result of caches expiring and additional traffic, or unrelated problems elsewhere in the network not under MS control. Background: http://www.politechbot.com/p-01662.html -Declan ********* Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2001 17:41:36 -0500 (EST) From: BMM To: Declan McCullagh Subject: Re: FC: Microsoft websites blacked out -- but what happened? Declan, This is a simple but powerful example of poor infrastructure design. Somehow they felt they needed four authoritative nameservers in order to provide reliable name service, but then placed all of them on the same network and in close proximity. Microsoft's down because of a rookie mistake. On Wed, 24 Jan 2001, Declan McCullagh wrote: