UNITED STATES — If you’ve tried to access one of your regular stops on the world wide web this morning without success, the problem may not be limited to you and your device.
Scores of popular websites were reportedly offline today, following a major cyber attack on a service provider that is affecting sites primarily in the United States. Twitter, Netflix and Paypal were among the sites users were unable to access as of the early hours, and some of the most serious outages continue.
According to industry site TechCrunch, the outages are the result of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the DNS provider Dyn.
“Dyn and other DNS providers operate as a link between the URLs you type into your browser and the corresponding IP addresses,” Darrel Etherington and Kate Conger note on TechCrunch. “By attacking Dyn, it’s possible to overwhelm that directory function and cause outages and loading problems across a large swath of the internet.”
Sites affected today include the Boston Globe, New York Times, Airbnb, Reddit, Shopify, Spotify and more. No group has claimed responsibility as of this time.
