If you, like many expectant humans round the world, are wondering why Twitter is down this Friday, then wonder no longer: it is down because this GARBAGE FIRE ELECTION BROKE IT, and the Twitter gods can't take one more second of our hashtags and memes and reciprocal trolling. OK, OK, that's not actually why, but it would be nice to think that maybe we could hit pause on the insanity for a second or two. The truth of the matter is that Twitter has intermittently been flickering in and out of availability for users Friday morning, according to server status reports from Down Right Now.
Although Twitter has not confirmed the cause of the disruption, The Independent reports that Twitter is down due to a "huge cyber attack" that also affected Reddit and Spotify. The origins of it appear to be in the eastern side of the US, but according to The Independent, service to these sites has been disrupted around the world. These sites are down specifically because they have one thing in common — they are supported by Dyn, Inc., a large internet provider. Dyn, Inc is now undergoing a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which essentially means that the servers are being attacked with so many requests from whoever is attacking them that they aren't able to load for regular dopey users like me.
Bustle reached out to Dyn, Inc Friday morning about the DDoS attack, and they provided Bustle with the following statement from Scott Hilton, EVP, Products at Dyn:
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.during this time.
We have been aggressively mitigating the DDoS attack against our infrastructure. Services have been restored to normal as of 13:20 UTC.
Customers with questions or concerns are encouraged to check our status page for updates and reach out to our Technical Support Team.
In the meantime, take a deep breath, step away from the laptop, and maybe go look at a tree or cuddle a dog or do something that isn't related to this massively depressing election cycle! Who knows? Maybe this little break is for the best.
