Major websites and services across the East Coast were shut down for two hours Friday morning by a denial of service attack.
Domain host company Dyn said the attack started at 7:10 a.m. and lasted for more than two hours.
Domain Name Servers (DNS) act as the Internet’s phone book. Basically, they facilitate your request to go to a certain webpage and make sure you are taken to the right place.
In a statement, Dyn said that this morning, October 21, Dyn received a global distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on its DNS infrastructure on the east coast starting at around 7:10 a.m. ET (11:10 UTC).
“DNS traffic resolved from east coast name server locations are experiencing a service interruption during this time. Updates will be posted as information becomes available,” the company wrote.
DYN encouraged customers with concerns to check the company’s status page for updates and to reach out to its technical support team.
If the DNS provider that handles requests for Twitter is down, well, good luck getting to Twitter. Some websites are coming back for some users, but it doesn’t look like the problem is fully resolved.
It affected Dyn’s Managed Domain Name System infrastructure, which serves companies including Amazon, Twitter, Spotify and CNBC.com.
The system directs users to the correct webpage.
We are aware of the ongoing service interruption of our Managed DNS network. For more information visit our status page.
Dyn said the services had been restored to normal by 9:20 a.m.
It was not known who was behind the distributed denial of service attack. The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment.
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’s a list of websites that readers have told us they are having trouble accessing.
