Huge cyber attack downs websites including Twitter and Spotify
The denial of service attack took down two of the world's biggest internet services for two hours
A major cyber attack caused websites such as Twitter and Spotify to suffer outages today.
The US internet provider Dyn said it had suffered a denial of service (DDoS) attack on its domain name.
Service was resumed after two hours, but millions of customers had been affected by the attack.
Other affected sites, which serve millions of customers, reportedly included the crafts marketplace Etsy and the software developer site Github, according to the website Hacker News.
A DDoS attack is where a hacker is able to overrun a domain's servers by sending overloading it with page visits, which in turn sends the servers into complete shutdown.
"This morning, October 21, Dyn received a global DDoS attack on our Managed DNS infrastructure in the east coast of the United States," said Scott Hilton, executive vice president for products at Dyn, in a statement.
"DNS traffic resolved from east coast name server locations are experiencing a service degradation or intermittent interruption during this time," Hilton added.
"We have been aggressively mitigating the DDoS attack against our infrastructure."
The company said it was continuing to investigate. Distributed denial of service or DDoS attacks involve sending high volumes of requests to websites which can be taken off line as a result.
Domain Name Services are a crucial element of internet infrastructure, converting numbered Internet Protocol addresses into the domain names that allow users to connect to internet sites.
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