Services like PlayStation Network were caught up in the problems
A major Internet outage affected many of the world's biggest online firms on Friday, with websites including Twitter, Netflix, Spotify, Reddit, PayPal and eBay down for long stretches. Other services such as PlayStation Network also appeared to be hit by the outage. Google and Facebook were unaffected.
The widespread disruption was the result of a coordinated assault on some of the underlying infrastructure that powers the Internet. Dyn, one of several companies responsible for hosting the crucial web directory known as the Domain Name System (DNS), suffered a sustained so-called “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attack, leading many people intermittently to lose access to specific sites or to the Internet entirely.
A DDoS attack means hackers hijack vast numbers of internet-connected devices to swamp a victim’s website with so much junk traffic that it is unable to cope. Dyn, based in New Hampshire, said the attack began shortly after 12pm BST. Twitter, Netflix et al were not directly targeted, but the attack on Dyn – which reportedly serves around 30 Fortune 500 companies – affected users’ access to those sites.
The company indicated that the issue had been fixed by 2.30pm, but that the assault began again a couple of hours later. Just before 7pm BST the firm said on its status page that the “advanced service monitoring issue” had been resolved, but that its engineers were “still investigating and mitigating the attacks on our infrastructure.”
