Internet giants hobbled by attacks

Overloads of 1 firm’s server infrastructure make sites inaccessible.

Cyberattacks on a key internet firm repeatedly disrupted the availability of popular websites across the United States on Friday.

Cyberattacks on a key internet firm repeatedly disrupted the availability of popular websites across the United States on Friday, according to analysts and company officials. The White House described the disruption as malicious.

Dyn Inc., based in Manchester, N.H., said its server infrastructure was hit by distributed denial-of-service attacks, which work by overwhelming targeted machines with junk data traffic. The attack had knock-on effects for users trying to access popular websites from across America and even in Europe. Among the sites apparently affected were Twitter, Netflix and Sony’s PlayStation Network.

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 human-readable 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.