News
These Websites Went Down In The DDoS Attack
If you have been wondering which websites are down in the DDoS attack early Friday morning, you're not alone. Internet users in many locations, but specifically the East Coast, logged on to find many major websites inaccessible, including Twitter, Spotify, and Reddit. The attack targeted systems run by Dyn, Inc., an international internet service provider, the Independent reports.
"This morning, Oct. 21, Dyn received a global DDoS attack on our Managed DNS infrastructure in the East Coast of the United States," said Scott Hilton, executive vice president of products at Dyn, in a statement provided to Bustle by email. "DNS traffic resolved from East Coast name server locations are experiencing a service degradation or intermittent interruption during this time. We have been aggressively mitigating the DDoS attack against our infrastructure." According to Dyn, normal services resumed at 9:20 a.m. ET.
That's a fair amount of technical lingo, but here's the general idea: Dyn runs domain name servers (DNS), which serve as a sort of directory for internet addresses. On Friday, a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack interfered with Dyn's servers by overloading them with requests. When servers receive too many requests at once, they stop responding — hence what happened Friday morning. Because Dyn is such an extensive internet provider, the DDoS attack caused many websites to experience partial or total outages along the East Coast.
So which sites went down in the attack? Here are the websites that experienced problems — it's not an exhaustive list, but it includes the major players. Fortunately, most seem to be up and running again.
Of all the sites that went down, Twitter was among the most noticeable.
Etsy
According to Hacker News, Etsy also experienced problems briefly, but it appears to be back to normal.
Spotify
Music streaming giant Spotify was among the sites affected.
Soundcloud
Soundcloud was down, but it later tweeted that the issue had been resolved.
Github
According to Hacker News, Github experienced server issues.
Amazon
According to Business Insider, Amazon was another massive site that went down for some users.
Netflix
CNN reported that Netflix was partially down, ruining the early-morning viewing marathons of users everywhere.
According to the Daily Dot, the self-proclaimed "front page of the internet," Reddit, experienced issues as well, but on Redditstatus.com, the site writes, "We're aware of upstream DNS issues but the Reddit service is operating normally."
Shopify
Shopify, a Canadian commerce platform, went down, and some users may still be experiencing problems.
Heroku
Heroku, a platform that provides "tools to build, run, and scale web application services," was down.
SaneBox
Email management site SaneBox tweeted that it was experiencing an outage.
