A number of the biggest sites on the internet have been brought to their knees today, with the likes of Spotify, Twitter and Reddit all suffering outages.
The issues experienced by these sites have been the result of two distribution denial of service (DDoS) attacks on Dyn, the host of some of the web’s biggest Domain Name Systems (DNS). With the DNS provider unable to handle requests from users seeking to access these sites, this has therefore led to these sites being forced offline, in a move that has affected roughly 30 of the some of the internet’s most frequented destinations.
A statement from Dyn regarding the DDoS attacks reads: “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.”
Along with sites such as PayPal, New York Times, CNN, Imgur and Yelp, the DDoS attack has also impacted the PlayStation Network, Sony’s online gaming service. A number of the sites that were taken down this morning have now been brought back online, though their performance has been sporadic.
The attack at 11:10am was followed by another attack at roughly 12pm, with the first targeting the East Coast while the second aimed for the West Coast. It has even managed to force the websites offline in Europe.
There’s no word yet on who is responsible for the attacks, though as is typically the case with these things we imagine that whoever carried them out will start bragging about it sooner rather than later.
