by Sara Ashley O’Brien, CNNMoney.com
October 21, 2016: 5:01 PM ET
Major outage temporarily hits popular websites
A number of popular websites like Twitter and Netflix went down for some users on Friday in what appears to be a massive cyber attack.
Affected sites included Twitter (TWTR, Tech30), Etsy (ETSY), Github, Vox, Spotify, Airbnb, Netflix (NFLX, Tech30) and Reddit.
Dyn, which manages website domains and routes internet traffic, experienced two distributed denial of service attacks on its DNS servers. A DDoS attack is an attempt to flood a website with so much traffic that it impairs normal service.
“If you take out one of these DNS service providers, you can disrupt a large number of popular online services, which is exactly what we’re seeing today,” said Jeremiah Grossman, chief of security strategy at cybersecurity startup SentinelOne.
Dyn said the attack started at 7 a.m., and were resolved later Friday morning. But issues continued, and by Friday afternoon, Dyn said it was investigating a third attack.
Initially, outages were primarily impacting those on the East Coast, but by midday Friday, people in Europe were reporting outages as well.
No one has claimed responsibility for the attack yet. A government official said the U.S. is “looking at all possible scenarios including possible cyber activity.”
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Noticed that only News1130 used a local reporter and local expert on this story. All the others carried canned stories from other agencies.