Twitter, Spotify, NYT, Reddit among major websites to suffer outage due to cyber attack

Popular sites such as Twitter, SoundCloud, Spotify and Shopify are reportedly affected by a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that has been aimed at a large DNS provider called Dyn.

According to TechCrunch, a few other sites have been experiencing issues such as Box, Boston Globe, New York Times, Github, Airbnb, Reddit, Freshbooks, Heroku and Vox Media properties.

Amazon's web services unit said on its site that it had identified the root cause of the issue and was working to resolve it. "Customers may experience failures indicating 'hostname unknown' or 'unknown host exception' when attempting to resolve the hostnames for AWS services and EC2 instances," Amazon said in the announcement on its site. 

The DNS provider Dyn stated that the attack affecting its customers is mostly around the US East coast and specifically Managed DNS customers. According to an update on Dyn's website, “Starting at 11:10 UTC on October 21th-Friday 2016 we began monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure. Some customers may experience increased DNS query latency and delayed zone propagation during this time. Updates will be posted as information becomes available.”

An FBI representative said she had no immediate comment on the outages.Dyn is a Manchester, New Hampshire-based provider of Internet infrastructure services, including managing DNS activity that connects a user to a website's servers.

DDoS stands for ‘distributed denial-of-service’ attack where a machine or network source is made unavailable for users by overwhelming the targeted website’s traffic bandwidth.

With Reuters inputs