If it seems like there have been more of these sorts of outages lately, it’s because there have. “Recently, some of the major companies that provide the basic infrastructure that makes the Internet work have seen an increase in DDoS attacks against them,” the security technologist Bruce Schneier wrote in a blog post in September. “Moreover, they have seen a certain profile of attacks. These attacks are significantly larger than the ones they're used to seeing. They last longer. They're more sophisticated. And they look like probing.” 
 
 “Probing” refers to a specially calibrated kind of attack, one that’s designed to take advantage of an individual website’s precise security weaknesses. “We don't know who is doing this, but it feels like a large nation state. China or Russia would be my first guesses,” Schneier wrote. 
 
 The stakes of such an attack—and the possibility of a state actor—seem especially high in the United States, given the extent of alleged outside tampering with the approaching presidential election. 
 
 In September, Krebs, the security researcher, also suffered a massive DDoS attack on his blog. It was so large, and so much bigger than historically comparable attacks, that internet-infrastructure company Akamai told him it could no longer host his blog pro bono, as it had for four years. (A spokesman for Akamai said none of its customers were affected by Friday’s attack.) 
 
 When his blog came back online, he attributed the assault to “super-empowered individuals who have been quietly building extremely potent cyber weapons with transnational reach.” He believes that someone harnessed a vast number of digitally connected “internet of things” devices—“mainly routers, IP cameras, and digital video recorders”—to make DDoS attacks of unprecedented size. Many of these devices have weak security in the first place, and some even have hard-coded and unchangeable passwords. 
 
 He compared a successful DDoS attack to a kind of censorship that the web can’t route around. “It's hard to imagine a stronger form of censorship than these DDoS attacks because if nobody wants to [host your website,] then that's pretty effective censorship,” he told Ars Technica. 
 
 In the wake of that hack, Schneier argued that the U.S. government must regulate the internet of things or face DDoS-ing botnets of dangerous size. Many attacks are carried out by malicious bots, which are responsible for a huge proportion of overall web traffic anyway. 
 
 “DDoS mitigation firms simply did not count on the size of these attacks increasing so quickly overnight,” Krebs wrote on Friday, “and are now scrambling to secure far greater capacity to handle much larger attacks concurrently.” 
 
 Even before the attack on Krebs’s site, Akamai reported the largest DDoS attack ever measured on its routed network earlier this year. “We also saw more web application and DDoS attacks than ever before, a trend that shows no sign of reversing,” Akamai wrote in a 2016 security report. 

 Criminals this morning massively attacked Dyn, a company that provides core Internet services for Twitter, SoundCloud, Spotify, Reddit and a host of other sites, causing outages and slowness for many of Dyn’s customers. 
 
 In a statement, Dyn said that this morning, October 21, Dyn received a global distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on its DNS infrastructure on the east coast starting at around 7:10 a.m. ET (11:10 UTC). 
 
 “DNS traffic resolved from east coast name server locations are experiencing a service interruption during this time. Updates will be posted as information becomes available,” the company wrote. 
 
 DYN encouraged customers with concerns to check the company’s status page for updates and to reach out to its technical support team. 
 
 A DDoS is when crooks use a large number of hacked or ill-configured systems to flood a target site with so much junk traffic that it can no longer serve legitimate visitors. 
 
 DNS refers to Domain Name System services. DNS is an essential component of all Web sites, responsible for translating human-friendly Web site names like “example.com” into numeric, machine-readable Internet addresses. Anytime you send an e-mail or browse a Web site, your machine is sending a DNS look-up request to your Internet service provider to help route the traffic. 
 
 ANALYSIS 
 
 The attack on DYN comes just hours after DYN researcher Doug Madory presented a talk on DDoS attacks in Dallas, Texas at a meeting of the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG). Madory’s talk — available here on Youtube.com — delved deeper into research that he and I teamed up on to produce the data behind the story DDoS Mitigation Firm Has History of Hijacks. 
 
 That story (as well as one published earlier this week, Spreading the DDoS Disease and Selling the Cure) examined the sometimes blurry lines between certain DDoS mitigation firms and the cybercriminals apparently involved in launching some of the largest DDoS attacks the Internet has ever seen. Indeed, the record 620 Gbps DDoS against KrebsOnSecurity.com came just hours after I published the story on which Madory and I collaborated. 
 
 The record-sized attack that hit my site last month was quickly superseded by a DDoS against OVH, a French hosting firm that reported being targeted by a DDoS that was roughly twice the size of the assault on KrebsOnSecurity. As I noted in The Democratization of Censorship — the first story published after bringing my site back up under the protection of Google’s Project Shield — DDoS mitigation firms simply did not count on the size of these attacks increasing so quickly overnight, and are now scrambling to secure far greater capacity to handle much larger attacks concurrently. 
 
 The size of these DDoS attacks has increased so much lately thanks largely to the broad availability of tools for compromising and leveraging the collective firepower of so-called Internet of Things devices — poorly secured Internet-based security cameras, digital video recorders (DVRs) and Internet routers. Last month, a hacker by the name of Anna_Senpai released the source code for Mirai, a crime machine that enslaves IoT devices for use in large DDoS attacks. The 620 Gbps attack that hit my site last month was launched by a botnet built on Mirai, for example. 
 
 Interestingly, someone is now targeting infrastructure providers with extortion attacks and invoking the name Anna_senpai. According to a discussion thread started Wednesday on Web Hosting Talk, criminals are now invoking the Mirai author’s nickname in a bid to extort Bitcoins from targeted hosting providers. 
 
 “If you will not pay in time, DDoS attack will start, your web-services will 
 
 go down permanently. After that, price to stop will be increased to 5 BTC 
 
 with further increment of 5 BTC for every day of attack. NOTE, i?m not joking. My attack are extremely powerful now – now average 700-800Gbps, sometimes over 1 Tbps per second. It will pass any remote protections, no current protection systems can help.” 
 
 Let me be clear: I have no data to indicate that the attack on Dyn is related to extortion, to Mirai or to any of the companies or individuals Madory referenced in his talk this week in Dallas. But Dyn is known for publishing detailed writeups on outages at other major Internet service providers. Here’s hoping the company does not deviate from that practice and soon publishes a postmortem on its own attack. 
 
 Update, 3:50 p.m. ET: Security firm Flashpoint is now reporting that they have seen indications that a Mirai-based botnet is indeed involved in the attack on Dyn today. Separately, I have heard from a trusted source who’s been tracking this activity and saw chatter in the cybercrime underground yesterday discussing a plan to attack Dyn. 
 
 Update, 10:22 a.m. ET: Dyn’s status page reports that all services are back to normal as of 13:20 UTC (9:20 a.m. ET). Fixed the link to Doug Madory’s talk on Youtube, to remove the URL shortener (which isn’t working because of this attack). 
 
 Update, 1:01 p.m. ET: Looks like the attacks on Dyn have resumed and this event is ongoing. This, from the Dyn status page: 
 
 Tags: Akamai, Anna_Senpai, DDoS, DNS, Doug Madory, Dyn, internet of things, IoT, mirai, OVH, Reddit, twitter 

 Twitter, Spotify and Reddit, and a huge swath of other websites were down or screwed up this morning. This was happening as hackers unleashed a large distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the servers of Dyn, a major DNS host. It’s probably safe to assume that the two situations are related. 
 
 
 
 Update 4:22 PM EST: Looks like this is probably going to get even worse before it gets any better. Dyn says they are being hit with a third wave of attacks. Dyn told CNBC the attack is “well planned and executed, coming from tens of millions IP addresses at same time.” 
 
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 Update 12:28 PM EST: Dyn says it is investigating yet another attack, causing the same massive outages experienced this morning. Based on emails from Gizmodo readers, this new wave of attacks seems to be affecting the West Coast of the United States and Europe. It’s so far unclear how the two attacks are related, but the outages are very similar. 
 
 In order to understand how one DDoS attack could take out so many websites, you have to understand how Domain Name Servers (DNS) work. Basically, they act as the Internet’s phone book and facilitate your request to go to a certain webpage and make sure you are taken to the right place. If the DNS provider that handles requests for Twitter is down, well, good luck getting to Twitter. Some websites are coming back for some users, but it doesn’t look like the problem is fully resolved. 
 
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 Dyn posted this update on its website: “Starting at 11:10 UTC on October 21th-Friday 2016 we began monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure. Some customers may experience increased DNS query latency and delayed zone propagation during this time. Updates will be posted as information becomes available.” 
 
 Here’s a list of websites that readers have told us they are having trouble accessing: 
 
 ActBlue 
 
 
 
 Basecamp 
 
 
 
 Big cartel 
 
 
 
 Box 
 
 
 
 Business Insider 
 
 
 
 CNN 
 
 
 
 Cleveland.com 
 
 
 
 Etsy 
 
 
 
 Github 
 
 
 
 Grubhub 
 
 
 
 Guardian.co.uk 
 
 
 
 HBO Now 
 
 
 
 Iheart.com (iHeartRadio) 
 
 
 
 Imgur 
 
 
 
 Intercom 
 
 
 
 Intercom.com 
 
 
 
 Okta 
 
 
 
 PayPal 
 
 
 
 People.com 
 
 
 
 Pinterest 
 
 
 
 Playstation Network 
 
 
 
 Recode 
 
 
 
 Reddit 
 
 
 
 Seamless 
 
 Spotify 
 
 
 
 Squarespace Customer Sites 
 
 
 
 Starbucks rewards/gift cards 
 
 
 
 Storify.com 
 
 
 
 The Verge 
 
 
 
 Twillo 
 
 
 
 Twitter 
 
 
 
 Urbandictionary.com (lol) 
 
 
 
 Weebly 
 
 
 
 Wired.com 
 
 
 
 Wix Customer Sites 
 
 
 
 Yammer 
 
 
 
 Yelp 
 
 
 
 Zendesk.com 
 
 
 
 Zoho CRM﻿ 
 
 
 
 Credit Karma 
 
 
 
 Eventbrite 
 
 
 
 Netflix 
 
 
 
 NHL.com 
 
 
 
 Fox News 
 
 
 
 Disqus 
 
 
 
 Shopify 
 
 
 
 Soundcloud 
 
 
 
 Atom.io 
 
 
 
 Ancersty.com 
 
 
 
 ConstantContact 
 
 
 
 Indeed.com 
 
 
 
 New York Times 
 
 
 
 Weather.com 
 
 WSJ.com 
 
 time.com 
 
 xbox.com 
 
 dailynews.com 
 
 Wikia 
 
 donorschoose.org 
 
 Wufoo.com 
 
 Genonebiology.com 
 
 BBC 
 
 Elder Scrolls Online 
 
 Eve Online 
 
 PagerDuty 
 
 Kayak 
 
 youneedabudget.com 
 
 Speed Test 
 
 Freshbooks 
 
 Braintree 
 
 Blue Host 
 
 Qualtrics 
 
 SBNation 
 
 Salsify.com 
 
 Zillow.com 
 
 nimbleschedule.com 
 
 Vox.com 
 
 Livestream.com 
 
 IndieGoGo 
 
 Fortune 
 
 CNBC.com 
 
 FT.com 
 
 Survey Monkey 
 
 Paragon Game 
 
 Runescape 
 
 Here’s an internet outage map from DownDetector as of 12:46 PM EST: 
 
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 Here’s a gif that shows the internet outage at 9:00 AM EST versus 12:30 PM EST: 
 
 Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF 
 
 At the time of publication Dyn said that it was still dealing with the problem. 
 
 
 
 What websites are down for you? Send a tip to william.turton@gizmodo.com. 
 
 Update 9:05 AM EST: Judging by emails from readers, this problem seems to be getting worse. 
 
 Advertisement 
 
 Update 9:43 AM EST: Dyn says the issue has been resolved. 
 
 Update 12:19 PM EST: Dyn says the issue is resolved, but multiple readers are messaging me to say they’re still having trouble accessing websites. 
 
 Update 12:25pm EST: It’s happening again. (see above) 

 Level3 Communications offers telecommunications services to business customers. Level 3 services include internet connectivite and managed services such as VPN, collaboration, voice and video.
– If you like to ease your way into the day by flipping on some Spotify tunes and checking out your Twitter feeds and favorite Reddit forums, Friday morning was probably pretty miserable. That's because those sites, and dozens of others, experienced annoying disruptions (or were down completely for some) as a large distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack took place on a major domain host company, Gizmodo reports. Then, just a couple of hours after host Dyn announced it had restored everything to normal, a second strike against its infrastructure came through. DownDetector.com's outage map showed huge red blotches across the parts of the US, with the East Coast getting slammed the hardest. Gizmodo lays out the technical explainer, labeling DNS (domain name server) hosts as the "internet's phone book," serving as a conduit to bring users to certain websites. If a DNS host like Dyn goes down or is otherwise adversely affected, it can have repercussions for all of the sites under its umbrella. The Krebs on Security blog, meanwhile, describes a DDoS attack, defining it as "when crooks use a large number of hacked or ill-configured systems to flood a target site with so much junk traffic that it can no longer serve legitimate visitors." Gizmodo lists all of the sites apparently plagued with issues Friday, while the Atlantic ponders an even more dire situation: what would happen if something like this took place on Election Day. (A hacker hated NYC so much he took New York magazine offline.)