It appears that one of the major providers of DNS services to the east coast of the US, Dyn, was hit by a concentrated DDoS attack large enough to slow down their services. Dyn provides the DNS backbone to sites such as Reddit, Github, Twitter, the New York Times and the Boston Globe, among others. The attack was large enough to literally slow down access to those sites by a large magnitude.
DDoS attack make your memes slower this morning
If you noticed some of the larger websites on the internet not quite responding to your queries this morning, it’s because a DDoS attack was conducted to great effect. Twitter was unresponsive and tweets couldn’t be sent and latency to some web request of a few east coast based sites were laggier than is usual. Dyn themselves spoke out on their status to explain what happened:
“As of 15:52 UTC, we have begun monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure,” a Dyn spokesperson reported through the company’s status page. “Our Engineers are continuing to work on mitigating this issue.This DDoS attack may also be impacting Dyn Managed DNS advanced services with possible delays in monitoring.”
It seems that the attackers are adamant about pushing enough arbitrary packets into their system to shut down everything they have. It’s unfortunate that the DDoS attack is one that can rarely actually be prevented and thus is an annoyance that must be ridden out and absorbed by something. That something is precisely the Internet backbone capacity that they have, which thus slows down everything else they are hosting and connected to. There were intermittent outages for all of the sites using Dyn, which also means some web applications will experience issues as well. Users of the personal website creator, Wix, were also affected.
Update
As it turns out, there’s another attack underway against the DNS provider, Dyn. The same services are being affected. Hopefully it subsides soon so services are returned to normal. This is why we can’t have nice things.