Massive DDoS Attack Brings Down Twitter, Netflix, Reddit
Websites like Twitter, Reddit, Netflix, Spotify and Etsy were briefly offline on Friday morning following a DDoS attack on Dyn Managed DNS.
An incident report from Dyn stated that at 11:10 UTC they began “monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure.” The company told customers that they may experience delayed zone propagation or increased DNS query latency during the incident.
The distributed denial-of-service attack, commonly known as DDoS, is an attack that floods a company’s servers with traffic in an effort to overwhelm the systems and shut them down. Dyn hosts many of the domain name servers for major websites, which is why hacking its system brought down so many popular sites.
A recent update from Dyn said that the attack is “mainly impacting U.S. East and is impacting Managed DNS customers in the region.” The company is investigating the issue.
A post on Hacker news confirmed that several sites such as Etsy, GitHub, SoundCloud, Spotify, Heroku, Pagerduty, Shopify and Intercom app were not loading their landing pages. Instead, most were getting a page that said, “This site cannot be reached.”
Others said it seemed that CNN, the Guardian, Circle CI, ZenDesk and BrainTree were also down.