An enormous cyberattack has disrupted traffic to hundreds of websites including Twitter, the Financial Times, Spotify, Reddit, eBay and the New York Times, particularly for internet users on the east coast of the United States.
The attack was targeted at a New Hampshire-based company called Dyn, a service that translates human-readable names for websites (such as ft.com) into an IP address that the internet understands. It’s the internet’s phone directory.
“Without it, we’d all be having to type numbers into web browsers rather than the names of websites.” said security researcher Graham Cluley.
Dyn is one of the largest services of its kind, and its widespread outage means the companies that rely on it will be unable to load their websites. Users arriving at the pages will get an error message.
“Starting at 11:10 UTC on October 21st-Friday 2016 we began monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our…infrastructure,” the company said on its site. “This attack is mainly impacting US East and is impacting…customers in this region.”
The Financial Times’ website was affected for a time, particularly in the US.