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[GRAND]

Twitter, Spotify and Reddit, and a huge swath of other websites were down or screwed up this morning. This was happening as hackers unleashed a large distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the servers of Dyn, a major DNS host. It?s probably safe to assume that the two situations are related.

Update 12:28 PM EST: Dyn says it is investigating yet another attack, causing the same massive outages experienced this morning. Based on emails from Gizmodo readers, this new wave of attacks seems to be affecting the West Coast of the United States and Europe. It?s so far unclear how the two attacks are related, but the outages are very similar.

In order to understand how one DDoS attack could take out so many websites, you have to understand how Domain Name Servers (DNS) work. Basically, they act as the Internet?s phone book and facilitate your request to go to a certain webpage and make sure you are taken to the right place. If the DNS provider that handles requests for Twitter is down, well, good luck getting to Twitter. Some websites are coming back for some users, but it doesn?t look like the problem is fully resolved.

Dyn posted this update on its website: ?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 websites that readers have told us they are having trouble accessing:

ActBlue
Basecamp
Big cartel
Box
Business Insider
CNN
Cleveland.com
Etsy
Github
Grubhub
Guardian.co.uk
HBO Now
Iheart.com (iHeartRadio)
Imgur
Intercom
Intercom.com
Okta
PayPal
People.com
Pinterest
Playstation Network
Recode
Reddit
Seamless
Spotify
Squarespace Customer Sites
Starbucks rewards/gift cards
Storify.com
The Verge
Twillo
Twitter
Urbandictionary.com (lol)
Weebly
Wired.com
Wix Customer Sites
Yammer
Yelp
Zendesk.com
Zoho CRM
Credit Karma
Eventbrite
Netflix
NHL.com
Fox News
Disqus
Shopify
Soundcloud
Atom.io
Ancersty.com
ConstantContact
Indeed.com
New York Times
Weather.com
WSJ.com
time.com
xbox.com
dailynews.com
Wikia
donorschoose.org
Wufoo.com
Genonebiology.com
BBC
Elder Scrolls Online
Eve Online
PagerDuty
Kayak
youneedabudget.com
Speed Test
Freshbooks
Braintree
Blue Host
Qualtrics
SBNation
Salsify.com
Zillow.com
nimbleschedule.com
Vox.com
Livestream.com
IndieGoGo
Fortune
CNBC.com
FT.com
Survey Monkey
Paragon Game
Runescape
Here?s an internet outage map from DownDetector as of 12:46 PM EST:

http://gizmodo.com/this-is-probably-why-half-the-internet-shut-down-today-1788062835

[GRAND]

Update 9:05 AM EST: Judging by emails from readers, this problem seems to be getting worse.

Update 9:43 AM EST: Dyn says the issue has been resolved.

Update 12:19 PM EST: Dyn says the issue is resolved, but multiple readers are messaging me to say they?re still having trouble accessing websites.

Update 12:25pm EST: It?s happening again. (see above)

[BAPHOMET.]

 

[Zankou.]

wtf

[Kurama]

These faggots better leave the Elder scrolls servers alone!!

[FlowerBomb]

Not it being only the uk and the us

[BAPHOMET.]

These faggots better leave the Elder scrolls servers alone!!

nerdy faggot

[yummy]

They need to hack Sallie Mae and erase our student loans

[Young]

Poor Playstation dsddddd'

Xbox would NEV'

[Cartierline]

Yeah I saw this, was wondering why Twitter was acting up.

[Annie]

Urban dictionary

[Pearls Khan]

Playstation Network

[GRAND]

Poor Playstation dsddddd'

Xbox would NEV'

umm

did you read the listing?

[CHOKE]

Annoying faggots 

[Eternal Bell]

ive been perch' on cec' website lissenin to her new music so idk a damns thing 'bout this