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The internet was dealt a crippling blow Friday morning as major websites, including Twitter, Spotify and Reddit were inaccessible.
As sites and services across the East Coast began to recover, word came of a possible second wave of attacks.
The culprit in both cases appeared to be a DDOS — that's distributed denial of service — attack on Dyn, an internet performance management company.
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Domain host company Dyn said the attack started at 7:10 a.m. and lasted for more than two hours.
Major Sites Suffer Outages: So What Is a DDoS Attack?
July 28, 201400:43It affected Dyn's Managed Domain Name System infrastructure, which serves companies including Amazon, Twitter, Spotify and CNBC.com.
A DDOS attack essentially floods a target with artificial traffic, knocking it offline.
It remains unclear who is behind the attacks — but the interruptions sent the internet into a tizzy.
While some were light-hearted, others peddled conspiracy theories...
... while others reminded us that with no Twitter, we were instead forced to make Friday small talk with our co-workers.