If you found yourself concerned that Internet on your phone or laptop was messing up this morning, you were not alone.
A major domain host reported a large distributed-denial-of-service attacks on its servers on Friday morning in the United States, according to the New York Times.
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On Friday morning, several major websites were hit with glitches and outages. Popular sites such as Twitter, Netflix, Spotify, Reddit, Etsy, Paypal, Soundcloud, HBO, CNN, the New York Times, and many others briefly went down.
Just after 7 a.m. on Friday, Dyn, the major domain hosts that monitors andreroutes Internet traffic, began experiencing problems. The most affected people were the Internet users on the East Coast.
Scott Hilton, EVP, Products at Dyn, wrote in an emailed statement provided to Bustle, “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. We have been aggressively mitigating the DDoS attack against our infrastructure.” According to Dyn, normal services resumed at 9:20 a.m. Eastern Time.
GitHub Status tweeted: “A global event is affecting an upstream DNS provider. GitHub services may be intermittently available at this time.”
A global event is affecting an upstream DNS provider. GitHub services may be intermittently available at this time.
โ GitHub Status (@githubstatus) October 21, 2016
GitHub followed the tweet by another one that reads: “The upstream DNS incident has been resolved. We continue to monitor our systems while they deliver a backlog of webhook events.”
The upstream DNS incident has been resolved. We continue to monitor our systems while they deliver a backlog of webhook events.
โ GitHub Status (@githubstatus) October 21, 2016
Dyn posted an update around 9:30 a.m. that the service had been “restored to normal.” The update on the company’s website said, “This attack is mainly impacting US East and is impacting Managed DNS customers in this region. Our Engineers are continuing to work on mitigating this issue.”
The major domain host is also conducting an investigation into 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 website read. “Some customers may experience increased DNS query latency and delayed zone propagation during this time. Updates will be posted as information becomes available.”
Anyone else having a whole lot of trouble with sites loading properly this morning? Paypal is down, Twitter was down, Netflix half loading.
โ Emmy Caitlin (@emmycaitlin) October 21, 2016
No additional information on the incident has been provided at this time.
Did you notice the Internet going out on your phone or laptop this morning?
[H/T New York Times, Hollywood Reporter, Bustle]