Perhaps with unprecedented timing, Neustar, the UltraDNS provider for several West Coast internet companies such as Amazon and Walmart, was reportedly targeted by DDoS attacks Wednesday, rendering service subscribers unusable two days before Christmas.

Reports began flooding the internet that Amazon, along with a host of other shopping web services, are down, as frustrated users tell of slow loading times and transactions cancelled at the last minute.

A representative from Neustar confirms that their company had been the target of DDoS attacks, specifically targeting their servers located in Palo Alto and San Jose, California. As of 6:15 p.m. PST, however, all services have apparently been recovered.

Distributed denial of service attacks, of DDoS, are concentrated attacks carried out on a server attempting to, as its name implies, deny service to users. A common method of performing DDoS is to overload a server with a great number of network requests (for example, accessing a web site on the server) that don’t really amount to doing anything. Unprepared servers will strain themselves trying to handle the huge network load, effectively denying access and network services for legitimate users who really need them.

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