Major cyber attack causes havoc on Internet: Twitter, Spotify among big websites to suffer outages due to DDOS attack

Major sites like Twitter, SoundCloud, Spotify, Shopify and a huge swath of other websites were down on Friday for many users due to a sweeping outage of DNS provider Dyn, as a result of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack, according to a post on Hacker News.

A report on Russian Today website says Spotify and Twitter could be among some major sites to suffer outages due to possible DDOS attack.

The possible DDOS attack against DynDNS is causing major issues on Internet, and many major websites across the world are reportedly unavailable on Thursday. 

According to Dyn DNS, the attack targeted its managed DNS service. If the DNS provider that handles requests for Twitter is down, the micro-blogging site may be among the websites which are hit by the attack.

“This attack is mainly impacting US East and is impacting Managed DNS customers in this region. Our Engineers are continuing to work on mitigating this issue,” DYN posted in an update on its website.

Some websites are coming back for some users, but it doesn’t look like the problem is fully resolved.

Below are few tweets shared by some websites on the possible DDOS attack-

 

We are currently experiencing major service outages.

— GitHub Status (@githubstatus) October 4, 2016

 

Our DNS provider is under a DDos attack. Causing connectivity issues for our webpage. Filtering of Inbox emails has not been affected.

— SaneBox (@sanebox) October 21, 2016

 

Our DNS provider is under a DDos attack. Causing connectivity issues for our webpage. Filtering of Inbox emails has not been affected.

— SaneBox (@sanebox) October 21, 2016

 

We are aware of the ongoing service interruption of our Managed DNS network. For more information visit our status page.

— Dyn (@Dyn) October 21, 2016

 

Uh oh, we’re having some issues right now and investigating. We’ll keep you updated!

— Spotify Status (@SpotifyStatus) October 21, 2016

 

Sites down this morning: Twitter, Tumblr, NYT, Reddit, PayPAl, WhatsApp, Daily News, CNN, Spotify, Soundcloud, etc.

— Bruno (@NovusDeum) October 21, 2016

What is DNS

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a tool used to resolve human-readable web addresses against IP addresses.

What is DDOS attack

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack occurs when multiple systems flood the bandwidth or resources of a targeted system, usually one or more web servers. Such an attack is often the result of multiple compromised systems flooding the targeted system with traffic.

A denial of service (DoS) attack is a malicious attempt to make a server or a network resource unavailable to users, usually by temporarily interrupting or suspending the services of a host connected to the Internet.

(This is a developing story)