Major websites like Twitter, Paypal, Spotify, Reddit, and many more were down today. It looks like the cause of this was hackers unleashing a large denial of service (DDoS) attack on the servers of Dyn, a major DNS host. It seems this DNS attach affected the United States and Europe mostly. While many people have reported that the sites are coming back up now, it seems there are more attacks happening.
For those who do not understand how Domain Name Servers (DNS) work, they act as the Internet’s phone book and complete your request to go to a certain website and make sure you are taken to the right place. So if a DNS provider that handles requests for say Reddit is down, well, good luck getting to Reddit. Throughout the day some websites have been coming back, but constant attacks seem to be making it very difficult to browse the web today.
Dyn posted this update on its website: “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.”
Here is a full list of major sites that seem to be affected by the DNS DDoS attack:
ActBlue
Basecamp
Big cartel
Box
Business Insider
CNN
Cleveland.com
Esty
Github
Grubhub
Guardian.co.uk
HBO Now
Iheart.com (iHeartRadio)
Imgur
Intercom
Intercom.com
Okta
PayPal
People.com
Pinterest
Playstation Network
Recode
Reddit
Spotify
Squarespace Customer Sites
Starbucks rewards/gift cards
Storify.com
The Verge
Twillo
Twitter
Urbandictionary.com
Weebly
Wired.com
Wix Customer Sites
Yammer
Yelp
Zendesk.com
Zoho CRM
Credit Karma
Eventbrite
Netflix
NHL.com
Fox News
Disqus
Here’s an internet outage map from DownDetector as of 1:39 PM EST:
We will keep you updated!
