A Major Denial Of Service Attack Brought Down Websites On The US East Coast
Brendan Mcdermid / Reuters
Websites such as Twitter, The Verge, and Spotify were down or had spotty service Friday due to a massive denial of service attack on the servers of Dyn, a major DNS host, which routes internet users to the correct websites.
The Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack overwhelms a company's servers with traffic from multiple sources to make online service unavailable.
Dyn said services were restored to normal after the first attack as of 9:42 am EST. Dyn was investigating another attack at 11:52 am EST.
DNS or Domain Name System is the internet's system for converting alphabetic names of websites — the ones humans use — into machine-friendly IP addresses which direct users' internet connection to the correct website.
A statement on Dyn's website said:
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.
This attack is mainly impacting US East and is impacting Managed DNS customer in this region. Our Engineers are continuing to work on mitigating this issue.
Other websites affected by the attack included Netflix, PayPal, SoundCloud, Etsy, Zillow, Shopify, Reddit, Github, and Pinterest.
Here's what the outage looked like.
It wasn't clear who was responsible for the attack. However, discussion threads on cyber communities suggested that the attacks might involve criminal extortionists targeting infrastructure providers, KrebsOnSecurity reported.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates and follow BuzzFeed News on Twitter.
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