The internet was a ghost town for many on the East Coast on Friday morning.
A massive cyber attack took down many popular sites across the internet including Netflix, Twitter, Spotify and Reddit.
Many of these popular sites could not be accessed because hackers released a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) on the servers of the web technology provider Dyn, which is a major DNS (domain name system) host.
The denial of service attacks floods websites with junk data and malicious traffic that prevents real users from accessing the pages, and kicks the site offline.
The attack began just after 7 a.m. ET on Friday, taking down websites like Twitter, Tumblr, Netflix, Amazon, Etsy, Github, Soundcloud, Shopify, Reddit, Github, Airbnb, PayPal and Yelp—just to name a few.
Dyn quickly updated its website to reveal it was investigating the issue.
"Starting at 11:10 UTC on October 21st-Friday 2016 we began monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure," the company writes. "Some customers may experience increased DNS query latency and delayed zone propagation during this time. Updates will be posted as information becomes available."
It further explained that the attack was mainly impacting those on the East Coast and was actively working on fixing the issue, with services returned back to normal just before 9:30 a.m. ET.
The company has not commented on the source of the attack.
Amazon took matters into its own hands to investigate as to why its services were down early Friday morning, also citing hosting issues. The same conclusion was found by cloud services company Heroku, which was also down.
Many of the companies that were affected by the outage kept people in the loop on Twitter to reveal that that their sites and services are currently down, and when the issues were resolved.
While it appears all is well again for those on the East Coast, that didn’t stop people from freaking out over the DDos attack.
UPDATE: Major DDoS attack confirmed by DYN, says it's "working to resolve the issues” https://t.co/lLfSuifOdD pic.twitter.com/XsiIeQrLKs
— Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) October 21, 2016
EA's servers are down due to a massive DDoS attack affecting loads of services. It is Battlefield 1 launch day. — Ben Ghoulbert (@RealBenGilbert) October 21, 2016
showing up to work this morning in the middle of the #dyndns #DDOS attack: pic.twitter.com/LOVizgiP3s
— Troy McCall (@interzonejunkie) October 21, 2016
At least Twitter, Spotify, Netflix and the rest appear to be back up and running.
Source: Hacker News
Photo: Christiaan Colen | Flickr
