Web attack takes down major websites on East Coast

by Ali Breland - 10/21/16 9:41 AM ET

A massive distributed denial of service attack slowed major websites to a crawl Friday morning.

{mosads}DynDNS, a tool that helps helps users access websites via simple domain names like Google.com instead of by their IP addresses, suffered distributed denial of service attacks that took down some of its services.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), which also provides domain name system tools, reported experiencing outages Friday morning as well but did not specify a cause.

Because of the attack, many sites that use Dyn and AWS — including Twitter, Reddit and Spotify — reportedly experienced latency or were not accessible.

Dyn and AWS said Friday morning that they had resolved the attacks.

However, by the middle of the day, Dyn and AWS said they were again dealing with an attack.

By late afternoon, both companies said that while they were still dealing with the attacks, they were now under control.

The initial attacks had primarily affected the East Coast, according to the DNS provider’s status page.

Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Gillian Christensen said that the agency is aware of the attacks and “are investigating all potential causes.”

– Updated at 4:22 p.m.