If you're low key trying not to panic while loading your internet and wondering why Reddit is down, wonder no more, because you are far from alone in your Friday morning #struggle. According to The Independent, sites like Reddit, Twitter, and Spotify are all down due to a "huge cyber attack" affecting Dyn, Inc, the internet service provider that powers the three major sites, among many others. The nature of the attack is a denial of distribution service, or DDoS, attack, which essentially means that the attackers are flooding the servers with so many requests that the sites are overloading, and service has been disrupted for regular users.
The attack seems to be concentrated from the east coast of the US, although according to service disruption reports, it is affecting users attempting to log onto these sites across the world. No word yet on who the attackers are or what their possible motives could be, but it's safe to say that it wasn't all of our #rage about the election that shut down the internet this morning, as many (rightfully) feared. No, whatever is going on here is way beyond the ordinary fist-shaking user's control.
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, everybody — take this as a sign from the internet to put the phone down and go smell a flower or something. It's Friday. You deserve it.
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