Music is life, and as someone who's always at my desk typing away, I'm constantly plugged into a Spotify playlist I've cleverly titled "The Writing Life." So, this morning, I started panicking when I learned the reason why Spotify is down: Apparently, a major DDoS attack shut down systems run by one of the world's biggest internet service providers, Dyn, Inc., affecting many websites including Twitter, Reddit and, unfortunately, Spotify.
Thankfully, the problem seems to be solved now.
Update: A second DDoS attack as been detected. According to Dyn's updates page, engineers are continuing to investigate and mitigate the issues as of approximately 2:00 p.m. EST.
Earlier: In a statement provided to Bustle, Scott Hilton, executive vice president of products at Dyn, Inc., said:
This morning, Oct. 21, Dyn received a global DDoS attack on our Managed DNS infrastructure in the East Coast of the United States. DNS traffic resolved from East Coast name server locations are experiencing a service degradation or intermittent interruption during this time.during this time.
We have been aggressively mitigating the DDoS attack against our infrastructure. Services have been restored to normal as of 13:20 UTC.
Customers with questions or concerns are encouraged to check our status page for updates and reach out to our Technical Support Team.
That means we basically had two hours of online mayhem, since people on the East Coast seemed to have started reporting problems around 7:00 a.m. — and two hours is a long time in cyberspace. An outage map at Down Detector gives us a good visual idea of what the DDoS looked like. Here's a zoomed-in version of the map, focusing specifically on the East Coast:
Clearly, that's a lot of states. I'm not a tech expert by any means, but I can tell this was not a good thing at all.
In case you were wondering, DDoS stands for "distributed denial of service," which is pretty self-explanatory. The job of a DNS provider like Dyn is to make sure you're sent to the correct website when you enter it into the URL bar of your internet browser. If a DNS provider isn't working, any websites under that provider will stop working, too. And it so happens that Dyn manages a boatload of popular web services and social media sites that, at this point, most of us feel like we can't live without. Just a few others that people reported this morning include CNN, HBO Now, Imgur, Paypal, Pinterest, and Yelp.
That's right: Not only were people without their tunes, but moreover, they couldn't even check the news or look up restaurants for lunch. If you're interested, here's the complete list of sites that were down. Broken internet isn't exactly the best way to start the weekend, but at least our troubles are over for now. Let's hope it stays that way.
Images: Pixabay, Down Detector
