Although the timing was most inconvenient—there were still some post-debate jokes to be made, and a “Weird Al” parody to share—you might have noticed that a ton of sites, including Twitter, were down this morning. Spotify and Reddit were inaccessible, as were CNN, Paypal, and Pinterest, which meant news and vision boards were bereft of updates for a solid couple of hours. Service briefly returned, only to go out again. It’s been determined that these outages were the result of multiple distributed denial of service attacks. Because DNS providers handle requests for access to sites like Yelp and Netflix, which were also down, an attack on them is an attack on us all (what? We still haven’t finished Luke Cage.)
According to Gizmodo, hackers orchestrated these DDoS attacks on the servers of Dyn, a prominent DNS host. The publication notes that the effects reached the West Coast and Europe. The A.V. Club hit a similar wall while trying to get news of the Singularity out on Twitter this morning.
Things seem to be back in order following the second attack, which Gizmodo reported on at around 12:30 p.m. ET. Dyn has posted an update on the issues, and Gizmodo has a full list of affected sites.
[Note: Gizmodo, like The A.V. Club, is owned by Univision Communications.]