It has emerged that a number of popular sites and services are down right now for many users, including Twitter, SoundCloud, Spotify and Shopify. The cause appears to be a sweeping outage of DNS provider Dyn, as a result of a DDOS attack according to a post on Hacker News. Other sites experiencing issues include Github, Airbnb, Reddit, Freshbooks, Heroku and Vox Media properties.
Commenting on this, Richard Meeus, VP technology EMEA at NSFOCUS, a DDoS mitigation company, said “DNS has often been neglected in terms of its security and availability from an enterprise perspective – it is treated as if it will always be there in the same way that water comes out of the tap and electricity is there when you switch it on. This attack highlights how critical DNS is to maintaining a stable and secure internet presence, and that the DDOS mitigation processes businesses have in place are just as relevant to their DNS service as it is to the web servers and datacentres.”
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