Amazon could also be blocking bots that harvest content. If your service has hit its performance limits, the first thing you do is shut off everything that's not making money. That would mean blocking online stores that serve up your images, blocking deal-finder web sites that harvest your content and price lists, blocking review-finder web sites that harvest your user comments, and blocking sleazy search engines that never stop crawling. It's a pretty standard practice to buy time during an emergency.

Time will tell what's going on. Amazon can't keep having outages without informing investors.

...using Layer 7 for intercepting our web browsing?

"a single attacker perpetrated a "layer 7" attack on IMDB"

Declined for comment?

Sounds like they frakked up....big time.

@Kevin McMurtrie,

Amazon have special pools of robot servers for search engines and the like. They don't block them as such - they just get a potentially lousy interactive experience which really doesn't matter too much if it is an automated scrape. The IPs get automatically added to a robots redirect list when they get in the top hit list. They may have got more clever since when I learnt this of course...