Most Internet users will have noticed that some of the world popular platforms are affected by a major DDoS attack. This includes platforms such as Twitter, GitHub, and even Reddit. The issue is caused by a denial of service attack against DNS service provider Dyn. Although the issue was seemingly resolved earlier today, the attacks continue relentlessly. For now, there is no ETA as to when services will be restored.
Major Dyn Outage Causes Serious Internet Issues
Distributed denial of service attacks are very common these days, albeit they usually impact only smaller online platforms. In the case of DNS provider Dyn, however, these attacks are causing a lot of havoc right now. Since most major platforms use this service provider for their DNS services, a lot of popular sites are affected by this outage.
According to Dyn, they first assumed it was an issue with the DNS network itself. However, that statement was rectified, later on, explaining a DDoS attack was to blame for this outage. At that time, only the US east coast was affected by the problems, which eventually evolved into a global problem. Millions of users are unable to access Twitter, Reddit, Soundcloud, and other sites.
A few hours ago, it became clear that the problems were not resolved, and European users started complaining about being unable to access particular services. New DDoS attacks were reported by Dyn, and their engineers have been attempting to mitigate the attacks ever since. So far there is no solution to this problem yet, and no one knows how long it will take to resolve matters.
As was to be expected, this DDoS attack is made possible due to clusters of hacked devices executing these DDoS attacks. Mainly IoT devices, computers, and smartphones are driving massive traffic to Dyn’s servers, flooding them with information. It is possible that services such as Netflix and Spotify are no longer accessible either.
All of this goes to show that services relying on centralized DNS service providers only have themselves to blame. Even though Dyn has a very respectable reputation, it is not viable for a lot of major companies to rely on one single company for DNS resolution. Decentralization is the way to go, and DNS servers should be among the first services to embraces this approach.
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