Twitter, Spotify and Reddit, and a huge swath of other websites were down or broken on Friday morning. This happened as hackers unleashed a large distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the servers of Dyn, a major DNS host. In order to understand how one DDoS attack could take out so many websites, you have to understand how Domain Name Servers (DNS) work. Basically, they act as the Internet’s phone book and facilitate your request to go to a certain webpage and make sure you are taken to the right place. 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.
Customers suffering from disruption included Twitter, SoundCloud, Spotify, Netflix, Reddit, Pagerduty, Shopify, Disqus, Freshbooks, Vox Media, PayPal, Etsy, Github, Heroku, Time, PlayStation, the Intercom app and more. While Dyn said that the issue has been resolved, users of the affected services were still reporting problems with connectivity at time of writing. Amazon Web Services was also impacted by the Dyn’s temporary collapse, and said: “Between 4:31 AM and 6:10 AM PDT, we experienced errors resolving the DNS hostnames used to access some AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region.
Credits:
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/21/major-websites-across-east-coast-knocked-out-in-apparent-ddos-attack.html
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