Eastern U.S. Hit by DDoS Attack

Dyn Inc., a major Domain Name Server and Web hosting service, said Friday that it has recovered from a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack that caused an Internet service disruption this morning on the east coast.

Per multiple media reports, sites supporting services such as Twitter, Reddit, Airbnb, Spotify, and Reddit were among those that were impacted.

As detailed in this week’s Multichannel News cover story (subscription required), DDoS attacks led by hacking groups have wreaked havoc on cable operators and have caused them to bolster their online defences. 

“Starting at 11:10 UTC on October 21th-Friday 2016 we began monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure. Some customers may experience increased DNS query latency and delayed zone propagation during this time. Updates will be posted as information becomes available,” Dyn initially reported on its status page, noting that the attack was primarily centered on in the eastern U.S. and impacting managed DNS customers in that region.

“Services have been restored to normal as of 13:20 UTC [9:20 a.m. ET],” Dyn posted on that site, as well as on Twitter:

Services have been restored to normal as of 13:20 UTC.

— Dyn (@Dyn) October 21, 2016

Comcast said it's also being watchful:

Known DNS issues seem to be resolving. Our engineers are closely monitoring this external issue. Updates here: https://t.co/eLN09p8UBc

— ComcastCares (@comcastcares) October 21, 2016

Updates: Issues resurfaced into the afternoon amid more hacker attacks. The latest from Dyn: "Dyn Managed DNS advanced service monitoring is currently experiencing issues. Customers may notice incorrect probe alerts on their advanced DNS services. Our engineers continue to monitor and investigate the issue. Customers with questions or concerns are encouraged to reach out to our Technical Support Team."

Dyn issued this update at 2:52 p.m. ET: "At this time, the advanced service monitoring issue has been resolved. Our engineers are still investigating and mitigating the attacks on our infrastructure."

Dyn issued this update at 6:17 p.m. ET: "This incident has been resolved."