"Amazon.com was taken down by a distributed denial-of-service attack that struck the Web site's load-balancing system, according to a rumor that's begun circulating among security professionals."
Don't know if it's true, but at least it's a reliable source.
I doubt this story. First, it's not sourced. Second, it lacks details. Third, NEWS.COM went and asked a bunch of actual security people, including Arbor Networks, which operates monitors plugged directly into the backbones of almost every tier 1 ISP on the planet, and nobody corroborated that it was a DDoS.
Who knows, maybe Arbor was covering, or maybe they screwed up. But the evidence for me favors something other than DDoS.
Don't know if it's true, but at least it's a reliable source.