The Internet is being hit with major outages around the United States today, as a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks hit DNS provider Dyn’s servers. A number of major websites and services have been affected, and the Department of Homeland Security is now investigating the attacks.
The problems began early Friday morning, as still unknown parties launched a massive DDoS attack on DNS provider Dyn. The first attack affected mostly the east coast of the U.S., with popular sites, such as HBO Now, CNN, Paypal, Reddit and a number of others all being affected to some degree.
While the earlier attacks abated some around 11AM Eastern time, new attacks were launched a bit after Noon Eastern, expanding the outages to other areas of the country, spreading as far as California. Websites and services for CNN, Netflix, Twitter, and the PlayStation Network were all affected by the second attack, and appear to be still having issues.
AppleInsider reports the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is “monitoring the situation” and the agency is “investigating all potential causes” of the outages.
Companies like Dyn provide domain names services (DNS), that resolve site names, like “mactrast.com,” to an IP address, so traffic knows where to go. An attack such as the one taking place today can prevent traffic from completing the trip back and forth on the connected servers and websites.
At this point in time, we don’t know who is behind the attacks, or their reasons for launching the attacks. We’ll keep you posted.
