If you had trouble loading websites at any point on Friday, there’s no need to run network diagnostics, reset your wifi connection or unplug your router.
What you can do is write your Congressperson and tell them to triple the cybersecurity budget.
On at least two occasions on Friday, hackers perpetrated a DDOS — that’s a distributed denial of service — attack on a domain name server company called Dyn that rendered websites like Twitter, SoundCloud, Spotify, Netflix, Reddit, PayPal and others inaccessible for hours.
We’ll spare you all the technical nitty gritty (it’s here if you want it), but basically Dyn’s job is to bring internet users to the webpages they request, so when it goes dark, so does site access.
We’re not experts by any stretch (unless you stretch across the office to our Tech team, who are in fact experts), but as more details emerge, we do have an idea about the culprit.
DDOS is trending did something happen? #Anonymous pic.twitter.com/WtYiEMPTB5
— Anonymous (@YourAnonCentral) October 21, 2016
For now, the issue appears to have been resolved in most cases and Dyn is continuing to investigate, but if you were planning on binge-watching Luke Cage this weekend, you may want to make other plans just in case.
While annoying, the attack was at least fodder for tweets acknowledging the humor of the situation, and the irony of trying to determine what was wrong with the internet by using the internet.
When you click a link to read about the #DDoS but it leads to a site that’s affected by said DDos. pic.twitter.com/MzFHfnp4qT
— Brian (@bkpsec) October 21, 2016
Before the ddos hack. And after. pic.twitter.com/oEpbEqUvlF
— Diane N. Sevenay (@Diane_7A) October 21, 2016
When you go on a site affected by DDoS pic.twitter.com/j5TXzAnBEd
— Ali (@ChocMilkSheikh) October 21, 2016
Well since Twitter is down from the DDoS and nobody will see this, I love Vaseline on toast.
— Andy Cole (@AndyCole84) October 21, 2016
showing up to work this morning in the middle of the #dyndns #DDOS attack: pic.twitter.com/LOVizgiP3s
— Troy McCall (@interzonejunkie) October 21, 2016
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