The website-attacking group “Anonymous” tried and failed to take down Amazon.com on Thursday. The group’s vengeance horde quickly found out something techies have known for years: Amazon, which has built one of the world’s most invincible websites, is almost impossible to crash.
Amazon has famously massive server capacity in order to handle the December e-commerce rush. That short holiday shopping window is so critical, and so intense, that even a few minutes of downtime could cost Amazon millions.
So Amazon (AMZN, Fortune 500) has spent years creating and refining an “elastic” infrastructure, called EC2, designed to automatically scale to handle giant traffic spikes. The company has so much spare server capacity, in fact, that it runs a sideline business hosting other websites. Its customers include the New York Times, Second Life, Etsy, Playfish, the Indianapolis 500 and the Washington Post.
Full story: Why ‘Anonymous’ failed to take down Amazon over Wikileaks