What we know about Friday's online downtime

folarin okunola

October 24, 2016 2:22 PM

The downtime was a result of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack aimed at Dyn, an Internet infrastructure company.

Internet Cables

Friday mornings are usually for casual surfing of the Internet, tweeting and general Internet 'chills' before the weekend gets into full swing.

However, you may have had some trouble on Friday, October 21, 2016, when you tried to access your usual sites and services. The entire day, from Spotify and Twitter to the New York Times and Reddit, a significant portion of the global Internet was down.

The downtime was a result of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack aimed at Dyn, an Internet infrastructure company based in New Hampshire in the US.

ALSO READ: Top websites shut in DDOS attack

Dyn offers Domain Name System (DNS) services - basically acting as an address book for the Internet. DNS is a system that resolves web addresses we see every day, like https://www.pulse.ng, into the IP addresses needed to find and connect with the proper servers so browsers (Mozilla, Chrome etc.) can deliver requested content.

A DDoS attack floods the DNS servers with so many lookup requests that make it unable to complete any.

The issue has since been resolved, though WIRED reports that Dyn is still dealing with spill-overs from last Friday's attacks. The source of the attack is yet to be determined but Dyn confirms that the scale is really big.

Attacks like this have not been recorded on this kind of scale in recent times. This also seems to be an isolated incident, though there were reports of outages in places as far as Asia.

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