The most recent outage on various social media sites and platforms caused a lot of confusion and alarm for most users. It is believed that a major DDoS attack caused the said outage to such sites as Reddit, Twitter and others.
According to Top Tech News, early morning of Oct. 21, a large Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack was directed at the internet performance management company Dyn was the reason for usage interruption for customers of Twitter, Spotify, Reddit and SoundCloud. It was reported that services were back to normal by 9:20am Eastern Time. Users of Twitter, Spotify, Reddit and SoundCloud were able to use it seamlessly after services resumed.
It is explained that a DDoS attack takes place when malicious actors overload an internet site with a huge number of traffic coming from hacked systems in different locations. In this case, the attack on Dyn, it affected their company's ability to manage DNS queries and connect traffic to IP addresses in an acceptable speed. This is why the Twitter, Spotify, Reddit and SoundCloud did not function for hours.
Even when the outage was resolved in few hours, some news sites said that it affected almost the entire East Coast of the US. Dyn's customers are sites such as Twitter, Spotify, Reddit and SoundCloud also include About.com, CNBC to name a few.
To add, DailyMail UK described that the attack is well planned and executed coming from several IP addresses at the same time. There was also a second attack confirmation at 1pm Eastern Time this time targeting UK servers. There were also several attacks being planned out across the globe. This will greatly affect the users of Twitter, Spotify, Reddit and SoundCloud worldwide.
Since Twitter, Spotify, Reddit and SoundCloud are highly used, it is also speculated that this attack may have something to do with the upcoming US Elections on Nov. 8, 2017. Many fear that if this is possible to a company as Dyn, then this could also be done during the actual day of elections as well.
