Widespread Outage of Popular Sites Because of DDoS Attacks

If Twitter is down, where do the masses go to complain when their other favorite websites aren’t loading?

Early Friday, Domain Name System provider Dyn confirmed it was experiencing a massive distributed denial-of-service attack, resulting in many slow-loading sites for its customers.

DNS providers map the human-friendly website addresses to the IP addresses, and an attack on such a provider can prevent users from connecting to websites.

“This attack is mainly impacting U.S. East and is impacting Managed DNS customers in this region,” Dyn posted on its status site.

Threatpost reported Twitter, Etsy, GitHub, SoundCloud, Spotify, Heroku, PagerDuty and Shopify all had extremely slow loads on Friday.

Though Dyn reported services were restored at 13:20 UTC, the company later posted its engineers were monitoring and mitigating another attack.

The company has not attributed these attacks to any source. However, KrebsOnSecurity.com pointed out it follows a Dyn researcher’s presentation about a DDoS mitigation firm with a history of hijacking internet addresses, though the site did not attribute the Dyn attacks to any of the companies mentioned in the presentation.

Dark Reading reported some security experts thought Russian nation-state hackers could be testing DDoS capabilities to disrupt news coverage for the presidential election.