Is the Internet Being Shut Down? No, the Internet Was Under Attack

If you were on the internet earlier in the day and were not able to access it then you are not alone. Internet was under attack and more than half the internet was shut down. There was a total of three attacks on the Internet, one at 7 AM, another one at noon and the last one at 4 PM eastern time. Most of the websites were shut down including Twitter, PayPal, Spotify, and Amazon.

The attacks were directed at a particular DNS service provider company, Dyn DNS. The Dyn server was under attack and eventually shut down, resulting in internet traffic to its clients’ websites being affected.

The attack on Dyn was a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. A DDos attack is executed by generating a huge traffic to a website or service eventually resulting in the shutting down of the service. As reported in CNBC, Dyn described the attack as, “well planned and executed, coming from tens of millions of IP addresses at the same time.”

The DDos attack used the smart devices in the household to generate a load on the service. Smart Devices such as household appliances like DVRs, routers, cameras, and printers were used to create “botnets” that overloaded the servers by sending millions of request per minute, leading to the shut down of the servers and eventually the Internet.

According to the intelligence agencies, such attacks were a clear case of Internet vandalism and may not be an act of an enemy nation, as reported on NBC news.

To add to the confusion of attacks and internet being shut down, Tweets from Wikileaks claimed the attacks were by its Supporters.