When the Entire Internet Seems to Break At Once

http://www.theatlantic.com ^ | Oct 21 2016 | Robinson Meyer and Adrienne Lafrance

[Beowulf9]

For more than two hours on Friday morning, much of the web seemed to grind to a halt—or at least slow to dial-up speed—for many users in the United States.

More than a dozen major websites experienced outages and other technical problems, according to user reports and the web-tracking site downdetector.com. They included The New York Times, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, GitHub, Etsy, Tumblr, Spotify, PayPal, Verizon, Comcast, EA, the Playstation network, and others.

How was it possible to take down all those sites at once?

[Beowulf9]

I love this post!

“This was supposed to be the attack on Russia, but the same Dem geniuses who couldn’t build the Obamacare website, attacked United States by mistake—with the added advantage that it shut up people about Wikileaks for a few hours”.

[RayChuang88]

Does that explain why Disqus.com is unreachable right now?

[TruBluKentuckian]

The attacks are still going on so in all probability it is the reason.

[ncdrumr]

And Oct. 26 is her birthday.

[TruBluKentuckian]

Dyn now reporting a third attack has been started.

[Raebie]

Where did you see Anonymous discussing this?

[TruthInThoughtWordAndDeed]

That is what I was thinking

[nurees]

My company’s clients haven’t been able to access our site most of the day.

[TruBluKentuckian]

Twitter

[RayChuang88]

Attacking Level 3 will REALLY bring the Internet down because Level 3 is a HUGE "backbone" provider of data transmission on the Internet. It they take down Level 3, it could literally take down much of the Internet in eastern Asia and Europe, too.

[CJ Wolf]

yep

[Raebie]

Which account? I can’t seem to find the reference before the attack started...TIA!

[American Quilter]

Ancestry .com available again—I’m back to work as long as it lasts.

[TruBluKentuckian]

Twitter just came back up for me, too. Odd they come back when Dyn is under a 3rd attack.

[TruBluKentuckian]

I have an 8 hour gap in the tweets for some reason since it came back up. Check @0HOUR1__

[American Quilter]

Can’t access wikipedia.org, though, which I use for geographical information.

[ichabod1]

It was still a good remark!

[Gideon7]

I bet each attack is using a totallly different methodology, which is why Dyn is having so much trouble keeping up because the have to re-adapt each time.

Anonymous is just showing off.

[TruBluKentuckian]

That makes sense.

[hoagy62]

This is weird. I was able to access Twitter, and found a guy who pointed people to the "Digital Attack Map". I checked it. It seems most of the attacks are coming from....Oman and Kuwait.

Hmmmmm.

Digital Attack Map