Internet down for many as massive cyber attack stops Reddit, Spotify, Twitter and other sites from working
The issue appears to be coming from the East side of the US – but is affecting internet services across the world
Your support helps us to tell the story
This election is still a dead heat, according to most polls. In a fight with such wafer-thin margins, we need reporters on the ground talking to the people Trump and Harris are courting. Your support allows us to keep sending journalists to the story.
The Independent is trusted by 27 million Americans from across the entire political spectrum every month. Unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock you out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. But quality journalism must still be paid for.
Help us keep bring these critical stories to light. Your support makes all the difference.
Much of the internet appears to be broken. And it's all because of one cyber attack.
A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack has taken down systems run by Dyn, Inc, one of the largest providers of internet services in the world. And as a result it seems to be causing problems for a variety of websites – including Reddit, Spotify and Twitter.
Dyn runs domain name servers or DNS. They work as a phone book or map to the internet, making sure that when someone writes an address into their computer or phone, it can be directed to the right place and show the right information.
As such, an attack on a DNS company can wreak havoc across large parts of the internet, stopping websites from loading. That is usually done through a DDoS attack, where the servers are hit with so many requests that they stop responding.
The attack is mainly hitting the East part of the US, according to Dyn, Inc. But because it is hitting the tools used to make websites load, it can cause problems across the world on various sites.
As well as the problem being generalised, some people in the same area might find that other people are able to get online, or that other devices are able to. That may be because of the way that DNS information is cached by some networks, meaning that it can still be accessed even if the servers themselves are down.
An update on Dyn's website read: “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.”
It said that its engineers were working to mitigate the issue, and that it would post more information when it was clear what was going on.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments