Several websites including Twitter and Tumblr were unreachable during an extended period for many U.S. internet users Friday following repeated online attacks.
Web-technology provider Dynamic Network Services Inc., known as Dyn, said its domain name system, or DNS, service was subject to a massive distributed denial-of-service attack starting at 7:10 a.m. on Friday. After the first attack was resolved, Dyn reported a second one around midday.
Denial-of-service attacks can knock websites offline by flooding them with junk data, blocking the way for legitimate users. Dyn’s DNS services are a key part of the digital supply chain that allows web addresses—Twitter.com, for instance—to take users to the infrastructure that hosts them.
Dyn didn’t disclose the source of the attack.
Dyn said access to Spotify was also interrupted, and other sites, such as GitHub and Fastly, said they were affected. The Wall Street Journal’s website also was down for periods Friday morning.
“We’re still digging into root cause, but ultimately it was limited to the East Coast of the U.S.,” Dyn spokesman Adam Coughlin said.
Security experts say denial of service attacks have grown more powerful over the past year.
A sustained assault on the website of security researcher Brian Krebs last month broke records partly because the network that launched it
used hundreds of thousands of connected cameras, digital-video recorders and other “smart” devices, according to website defender Akamai Technologies Inc.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is aware of the attacks and is “investigating every potential cause,” said spokesman Todd Breasseale.
Airbnb Inc. was hit by the outage, making the home-rental company’s website “intermittently available” for a short period Friday morning, spokesman Nick Shapiro said, adding that the site was back to running normally.
Amazon.com Inc. said it had found the root cause of DNS problems affecting its East Coast cloud customers and resolved the issue, though it didn’t disclose the cause. Amazon had said it was looking into an elevated number of errors related to accessing its cloud services in a main East Coast server hub because of DNS issues. Amazon Web Services runs a broad array of websites.
Amazon said the problems occurred between 7:31 a.m. and 9:10 a.m. Eastern time.
Cloud-services provider Heroku Inc. also said it saw “widespread” DNS issues related to a denial of service attacks against one of its DNS providers, but it had resolved the issue.
A spokeswoman for GitHub Inc., a service used by programmers and major tech firms world-wide to create software, acknowledged that the company was “one of the sites affected.” She declined to elaborate on the impact or the steps GitHub took to address the problem.
Alphabet Inc.’s Google Cloud Platform, a much smaller competitor to Amazon Web Services, didn’t experience any service disruptions Friday, said spokesman Michael Moeschler.
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