Internet

Half of the internet went down and this is why (Update: Resolved, finally.)

Don’t worry, it’s not just you. The internet is down for a lot of people this morning.

by
Kevin Raposo
October 21, 2016

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Don’t worry, it’s not just you. The internet went down for a lot of people today.

A lot of your favorite websites were down today thanks to a large distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the servers of Dyn, a highly popular DNS host. That means sites like Twitter, Reddit, Spotify, and PayPal were down or weren’t working like they normally do.

Update: 6:40 PM EST: After a long day, services have been restored to normal. Dyn says “This incident has been resolved.”

Update 4:55 PM EST: The situation doesn’t look like it’s getting any better. Apparently Dyn claims they are experiencing a third-wave of attacks. “It’s a very smart attack. As we mitigate, they react.” They also added to CNBC the attack is “well planned and executed, coming from tens of millions IP addresses at same time.”

Update 12:31 PM EST: Wide spread outages are sweeping the internet again. This attack seems to focus more on West Coast users of the United States and Europe. At this point, it’s unclear if the two attacks are related. Dyn updated their website with this statement: “As of 15:52 UTC, we have begun monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure. Our Engineers are continuing to work on mitigating this issue.”

Domain Name Servers are pretty much the phone book to the internet. It essentially processes your request to go to a particular webpage instead of somewhere else. So if the DNS provider isn’t able to handle the request, chances are you won’t be granted access.

Dyn took to their website and provide this update:

“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 some of the website that are affected: