The Internet is having a bad day after massive cyberattack

The internet is having a bad day. Several major websites, including Twitter, Spotify, Reddit, and I heart Radio, experienced technical difficulties Friday with servers appearing to be down or unresponsive. The culprit was a massive distributed denial of service attack on a domain names system host that works behind the Seems to keep websites running smoothly. The host, Dyn DNS announced that it was hit by an overwhelming amount of traffic form multiple sources. It's an attack method usually deployed to disable a website. But in the case, the attack was on a service that manages multiple websites, and outages were mostly felt by folks on the east coast. Then DNS was able to restore services at about 9:30 AM Eastern time. Which was about two and a half hours after the attack began. The host will not say which websites it works with, but suddenly when its services were up and running, so were many websites that were previously down earlier in the day. So, it's safe to say these outages were related. That's it for this tech news update, I'm Bridget Carey. Stay on top of the biggest stories at Cnet.com/update.