Major Part of the Internet Goes Down

A big part of the Internet went down on Friday night (or Friday Morning in the US). Following a big DDOS attack on a major DNS provider called Dyn many major websites went down. The attack took place in three waves bringing major website which includes the following down for a few hours: Twitter, Reddit, Yelp, Imgur, PayPal, Shopify, Soundcloud, Spotify, GitHub, Heroku, Etsy, Box, Weebly, Wix, Squarespace, CPAN, NPM, Basecamp, Twilio, Zoho, HBO, CNN, Starbucks, Yammer, Bit.Ly and many others.

Although these sites were back up in between the three waves but these went down again when the other DDOS attacks happened.

What is a DDOS attack?

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is an attempt to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources. Basically it sends multiple requests to a DNS server so much that it renders it useless and unable to handle that much traffic.

This DDOS attack was big and took out major and most used websites on the internet.