People all around the world are complaining that Twitter went down today, and while the company had brought it back up, hackers knocked it back down. Twitter isn’t the only website having issues either, so you may have noticed that PayPal, Netflix, eBay, Spotify and many other popular websites have gone down.
Twitter down due to massive DDoS attack
Twitter is down because of a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that has taken down a large chunk of the most popular websites in the world today. The company brought its service back online after having problems for much of the day, but then Twitter went down again.
The micro-blogging platform’s support team said, “The earlier issues have resurfaced & some people may still be having trouble accessing Twitter. “We’re working on it!”
Twitter down due to attack on Dyn
In addition to Twitter being down, PayPal, eBay, Reddit, Spotify, Netflix and many other websites were taken out by the DDoS attack a well. PlayStation Network and Xbox Live were also taken out by the attacks. Hackers laid into servers owned by Dyn, which is one of the world’s biggest domain name server (DNS) hosts. A DDoS attack involves overwhelming a server with traffic in order to deny service to the website’s users.
The reason an attack on servers owned by one company has such a wide-reaching impact on the world’s biggest websites is because a DNS company such as Dyn sort of directs internet traffic, bringing the user to the website they want to go to after typing in an address or clicking on a link in search results. Taking down a DNS company like Dyn enables hackers to keep people from being able to access website.
The outage that took Twitter down and a long list of other websites as well mainly impacted the eastern part of the U.S. at first, Dyn said, although the company warned that the nature of the attack meant it could affect websites in other parts of the world as well.
Scott Hilton, EVP, Products at Dyn has issued a press statement:
“This morning, October 21, Dyn received a global DDoS attack on our Managed DNS infrastructure in the east coast of the United States. DNS traffic resolved from east coast name server locations are experiencing a service degradation or intermittent interruption during this time. Updates will be posted as information becomes available.
Upon recognition, active mitigation protocols were initiated and have been working to resolve the issues.
Customers with questions or concerns are encouraged to check our status page for updates and reach out to our Technical Support Team.”
Another wave of attacks takes Twitter down again
This latest wave that took Twitter down, along with all the others, seems to be affecting other parts of the world, especially the West Coast of the U.S. and also Europe. Dyn said earlier today that it had restored service to all of the affected websites after hours of them being down. However, hackers struck again, this time apparently impacting an even bigger geographic area.
The list of websites that are being impacted is quite long at this point, so if you run across a major website that you can’t access, it’s probably because of this widespread outage. Somehow Facebook and Google managed to escape without impact… at least for now.
