On 21st October, 2016, a number of websites and services have reportedly gone down due to a major cyber attack. A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack has taken down systems run by DynDNS who happen to be one of the largest providers of Internet services globally.
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.
Currently, major websites and services like Twitter, SoundCloud, Spotify, Reddit etc have been affected as a result of the attack. Other sites experiencing issues include Box, Boston Globe, New York Times, Github, Airbnb, Freshbooks, Heroku and Vox Media properties.
Users accessing the affected sites might have more or less success depending on where they’re located, as some European and Asian users seem to not be facing these issues.
DynDNS had the following statement to make :
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.