MANCHESTER, N.H., Oct. 21 (UPI) -- A cyberattack early Friday temporarily eliminated access to Twitter, Spotify and other websites, industry officials said.
Internet performance company Dyn, headquartered in Manchester, N.H., said its domain name system was overloaded by an online attack, causing distributed-denial-of-service situations for computer users accessing Dyn clients including Twitter, Spotify, Reddit, Netflix and Amazon. Sites began experiencing problems at around 7:10 a.m. Friday, but many were available by 9:30 a.m., USA Today reported.
Distributed-denial-of-service typically involves the flooding of websites with worthless data, blocking their use by legitimate users.
A Dyn update, posted at 8:45 a.m., said "This attack is mainly impacting U.S. East and is impacting Managed DNS customers in this region. Our Engineers are continuing to work on mitigating this issue."
Services were running normally by 9:20 a.m., Dyn said, without disclosing the cause of the outage. Amazon.com also reported it learned the cause but did not explain it.
