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Massive Cyber Attacks Down Popular Websites on East Coast

cyber security
AP
October 21, 2016

Two sets of massive cyber attacks downed many popular websites on the East Coast Friday morning.

Sites such as Netflix, Amazon, Twitter, Reddit, and Spotify were all not functioning after the first wave of attacks hit around 7:10 a.m., USA Today reports. Most of these sites were back to normal around 9:30 a.m.

The internet performance company Dyn suffered a denial-of-service attack and reported that many of the websites were suffering Friday morning.

At 8:45 a.m., Dyn posted an update as to the situation.

"This attack is mainly impacting U.S. East and is impacting Managed DNS customers in this region," Dyn said. "Our engineers are continuing to work on mitigating this issue."

Amazon, whose web service AWS hosts Netflix, among other popular sites, posted an update as well on Friday morning.

"Some AWS customers experienced errors establishing connectivity to a small number of AWS endpoints," Amazon said. "These events were caused by errors resolving the DNS hostnames for some AWS endpoints."

"The root cause was an availability event that occurred with one of our third party DNS service providers," Amazon further stated. "We have now applied mitigations to all regions that prevent impact from third party DNS availability events."

It is currently unknown who was behind the attack.

"At this point I don't have any information about who may be responsible for this malicious activity," White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told USA Today, noting that the Department of Homeland Security was "monitoring the situation."