Amazon Outage: Hacker Group Takes Credit, But Amazon Denies Outside Involvement

Amazon, one of the world's largest online retailers, has experienced a rare issue: an hour-long outage that affected users all across the U.S.

Users trying to access the Amazon homepage reported a series of errors with "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable" adorning the site.

"The gateway page of Amazon.com was offline to some customers for approximately 49 minutes. Other pages of the site were accessible and AWS was not impacted," Amazon spokesman Ty Rogers said in a statement to the media. The spokesman did not give any particular reason for the disruption.

While a temporary outage is not something never seen before, the 503 errors brought up during the down time are sometimes linked to DDoS attacks or other types of overloads. Such 503 errors can also be associated with maintenance issues, but when it comes to e-commerce giants or other places where user data is stored it raises a few questions. Moreover, Amazon's homepage itself continued to be down even as its S3 cloud service and product pages started to go back online.

Amazon said that it was not the victim of a DDoS attack and the outage was not related to any outside involvement, but a hacker group called Nazi Gods has taken credit for the outage. Taking credit for something does not make it true, but the group even went to Twitter to explain how it brought down Amazon.

"We used a 7kbotnet running hoic 100 threads each. 80servers in botnet and a 16gbps booter," boasted the hacker group.

As it turns out, however, this is not the first time that Nazi Gods made questionable claims regarding its role in a successful attack. Just a couple of weeks ago, Cyber War News gathered substantial evidence that Nazi Gods had taken credit for bringing down cyberwarnews.info when in fact it had not.

Amazon's Web site is now fully up and running and the company did not confirm being hacked, which only seems to have angered Nazi Gods even more.

"Amazon claims no ddos attack happened. Ofcourse, any attempt to rekindle your ub3r 1337 servers reputation. Gtfo @amazon," added the group.

Although Nazi Gods is very determined to convince everyone that it is behind the Amazon outage, its claims should be taken with a grain of salt, as no substantial evidence backs up those claims.