Many mainstream, major internet sites, along with thousands of smaller ones, were down early Friday morning following a cyberattack on a massive Domain Name System (DNS) host.
Twitter, Spotify, SoundCloud, Reddit, PayPal and numerous other sites reported being down this morning. Twitter especially seems to have ongoing issues and won’t load for many. Walgreens and countless others are down but it’s unclear just how many major websites have been affected. We will keep this list updated.
Dyn, a company that hosts domain name systems, announced that they have been the subject of a cyberattack that caused major problems for countless websites. Hackers unleashed a large distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the servers of Dyn.
An attack began at roughly 7 am EST. and Dyn was able to resolve the issue within a few hours, but at 11:52 pm EST. the company said that they were being hacked again. After the second attack, numerous sites such as Twitter reported problems.
Dyn released this statement earlier this morning.
“Starting at 11:10 UTC on October 21th-Friday 2016 we began monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure. Some customers may experience increased DNS query latency and delayed zone propagation during this time. Updates will be posted as information becomes available.”
DNS takes the text URL that is typed into a browser and then pings the information to several servers to get the person to the correct website.
DDoS stands for “distributed denial of service” and is a common tactic used by hackers to take down internet-connected servers. Massive amounts of traffic is sent to servers, effectively denying other users to enter those servers.
It is unclear who was responsible for the attack on Dyn.
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