Widespread Internet Attack Continues to Affect Twitter, Netflix, Spotify and Dozens of Other Sites
Twitter, Netflix, Spotify, PayPal, SoundCloud, HBO Now and dozens of other sites and services continued to struggle with availability issues throughout Friday as the result of a massive internet attack that spread throughout the day. The Department of Homeland Security is investigating the attack.
The outages began in the early morning hours Friday, and initially only affected users on the U.S. East Coast. However, later in the morning, it continued to spread to the West Coast, with users reporting issues with streaming movies on Netflix, songs on Spotify and DJ mixes from SoundCloud.
Twitter has been particularly hard hit, and its website remained unavailable for many users throughout the day. Twitter’s mobile app and desktop clients like Tweetdeck have been less affected, but users have in many cases been unable to view images and videos on Twitter. Twitter’s link shortening service has also been brought to its knees, making it impossible for many users to open any links shared on Twitter.
The attack itself is based on a kind of Achilles heel of the internet: When users enter a web address like Twitter.com into their browser bar, the computer first queries a so-called domain name server (DNS) to figure out where it can find Twitter’s server — think of it as a kind of phone book for the internet, used to look up the numbers that correspond with the names of services like Netflix and Twitter.
One of the key DNS services of the U.S. internet was flooded with waves of countless bogus requests Friday, something that’s called a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, leading to an extended outage. Dynamic Network Services, the company running the affected DNS servers, initially stated that it had mitigated the situation at around 7am PT, but has faced a number of subsequent attack waves since.
The Department of Homeland Security said Friday that it was investigating the attack for possible criminal activity. There is no word yet on who may be behind the attack, but the timing suggests a possible link to supporters of controversial WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Earlier this week, the Ecuadorian embassy disconnected Assange from the internet in response to WikiLeaks publishing hacked Clinton campaign emails.
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