So apparently there was a huge cyber attack this morning, and here’s what that means

If Twitter wasn’t working when you tried to share your Friday Feeling GIFs this morning, don’t worry, you weren’t alone. A cyber attack affected internet access across the world earlier today.

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack knocked out several extremely popular websites on the Internet when it targeted servers owned by Dyn, an Internet performance management company. The attack apparently originated in the eastern U.S.

Many of you (ourselves included) may have experienced slight emotional meltdowns in your offices when sites like Twitter and Spotify were unavailable for about two hours.

Dyn posted that service was restored at about 9:20 a.m. EST. Twitter confirmed that the issue was resolved about an hour later. A DDoS cyber attack overwhelms computers with traffic, slowing down connections. The attack may even disrupt access for legitimate traffic completely.

And of course, the Internet has since been abuzz.

Other major websites affected included Reddit and Vox.

Scott Hilton, executive vice president at Dyn, said the company is investigating the cyber attack and its connection to the outages. He added that restoring service for customers was their main priority this morning.

Dyn’s customers include Twitter, Spotify, Reddit, BT, SoundCloud, CNBC, About.com, and Zillow. It’s not clear if all of these customers were affected.

As alarming as this is, and as many other questions as we have (as in, who was behind this? Will it happen again?) we can at least breathe easy for now — the internet is safe again for the time being.

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