Cyberattack shuts down popular websites

LONDON — Cyberattacks on a key Internet firm repeatedly disrupted the availability of popular websites across the planet on Friday, according to analysts and company officials.

The attack had knock-on effects for users trying to access popular websites from across the U.S., Canada and Europe.

Among the sites apparently affected were Twitter, Netflix, and Sony’s PlayStation Network.

Netflix Canada said it was experiencing issues streaming on some devices and was working to resolve the problem.

The White House described the disruption as malicious.

Manchester, New Hampshire-based Dyn Inc. said its server infrastructure was hit by distributed denial-of-service attacks, which work by overwhelming targeted machines with junk data traffic.

The level of disruption was difficult to gauge, but Dyn provides Internet traffic management and optimization services to some of the biggest names on the web, including Twitter, Netflix and Visa.

Critically, Dyn provides domain name services, which translate the humanreadable addresses such as “twitter.com” into an online route for browsers and applications.

Steve Grobman, chief technology officer at Intel Security, compared an outage at a domain name services company to tearing up a map or turning off GPS before driving to the department store. “It doesn’t matter that the store is fully open or operational if you have no idea how to get there,” he said in a telephone interview.

Jason Read, founder of the Internet performance monitoring firm CloudHarmony, owned by Gartner Inc., said his company tracked a half-hour-long disruption early Friday in which roughly one in two end users would have found it impossible to access various websites from the East Coast. A second attack later in the day caused disruption to the East and West Coasts as well as impacting some users in Europe.

“It’s been pretty busy for those guys,” Read said. “We’ve been monitoring Dyn for years and this is by far the worst outage event that we’ve observed.”

Read said Dyn provides services to some six per cent of America’s Fortune 500 companies. That means a lot of disruption.

“It impacted quite a few users,” he said of the morning’s attack.