MANCHESTER, NH – A global disruption in service targeting Manchester-based tech company Dyn’s infrastructure is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, as a second wave of attacks just before noon further crippled many popular websites.
The initial attack, reported just after 7 a.m. EST, primarily affected service along the U.S. East Coast, and “shut down half the Internet,” according to tech publication Gizmodo. A secondary attack was discovered at about 11: 52 a.m., this time resulting in massive outages on the West Coast and parts of Europe. It’s not yet clear whether the two attacks are related.
Wall Street Journal posted Friday afternoon that the source of the denial-of-service or DDoS on Dyn’s domain name system was not yet known, but that Homeland Security was looking into “all potential causes.”
CNBC is reporting that U.S. intelligence officials have ruled out North Korea as a suspect.
A DDoS attack is when a web service is deliberately overwhelmed by traffic from many sources in order to deter legitimate traffic, a recognized method for digital assaults.
Dyn said the attack may also impact “Dyn Managed DNS advanced services with possible delays in monitoring.”
Among the known site disruptions: Twitter, Tumblr, Spotify, Reddit, Amazon, and cloud service provider Heroku, which were rendered unreachable in many cases by end users.
Below is a list of many affected sites based on Gizmodo reader feedback:
