Several cyber attacks disrupted Web traffic on the East Coast Friday, shutting down access to some of the Web’s most popular sites and frustrating their users.
A slew of major sites including Twitter, Netflix, and Spotify were affected by what was described as a DDoS, or a distributed denial of service attack, on the Internet services company Dyn.
“Starting at 11:10 UTC [7:10 EDT] on October 21st-Friday 2016 we began monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS [domain name system] infrastructure,” Dyn reported. Dyn said the attack was resolved less than two hours later, by 9:20 EDT.
But reports of an additional attack surfaced later in the day, and the company found itself on the ropes once again.
“Our engineers continue to investigate and mitigate several attacks aimed against the Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure,” the company wrote on their website at 1:53 EDT.
On Twitter on Friday afternoon, “DDoS” became the top trending topic, with tens of thousands of tweets mentioning the attacks.
Sites taken down by the DDoS attack today:
• SoundCloud
• Spotify
• Netflix
• Disqus
• PayPal
• Shopify + more— Troy Osinoff (@yo) October 21, 2016
Gary Miliefsky, the CEO of Snoopwall, told FoxNews.com that DDoS attacks are common and can be launched cheaply.
“[They] have become so frequent and due to the massively deployed secret botnets (malware running on computers all over the globe), you can lease a DDoS attack against any target, like Dyn, for a very low cost,” he said in an email. “In addition, with the exponential power of computing, one can build DoS equipment for less than $300. “
A global event is affecting an upstream DNS provider. GitHub services may be intermittently available at this time.
— GitHub Status (@githubstatus) October 21, 2016
Some companies like Spotify took to Twitter to report problems Friday morning.
“Uh oh, we’re having some issues right now and investigating,” the company reported at 8:59 am. “We’ll keep you updated!”
Later, they announced that the problem had been fixed, but then tweeted again at 12:31 pm that they were having more issues.
We’re aware of some issues right now and are checking them out! We’ll keep you posted.
— Spotify Status (@SpotifyStatus) October 21, 2016
