Popular sites like Amazon, Twitter and Netflix suffer outages

By Sara Ashley O’Brien

A number of popular websites like Amazon and Netflix were down for some users on Friday morning in what appears to be a massive DDoS attack.

A DDoS attack — or denial of service — is an attempt to flood a website with so much traffic that it impairs normal service.

According to tech news forum Hacker News, the outage is a result of an attack on Dyn’s DNS server. Dyn manages website domains.

Among the sites that appear to be affected include Twitter, Etsy, Github, Vox, Spotify, Airbnb, Netflix and Reddit.

“Starting at [7:00 a.m. ET] on October 21… we began monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure,” the company said in a statement.

“This attack is mainly impacting U.S. East and is impacting Managed DNS customers in this region. Our engineers are continuing to work on mitigating this issue.”

By 9:20 a.m., Dyn said “the services have been restored to normal.”

No one has claimed responsibility for the attack yet. A government official said the U.S. is “looking at all possible scenarios including possible cyber activity.”

While little information is available about the cause or who is behind the attack, companies turned to Twitter to tell customers to stay patient.

“Uh oh, we’re having some issues right now and investigating. We’ll keep you updated!” tweeted Spotify.

“A global event is affecting an upstream DNS provider. GitHub services may be intermittently available at this time,” tweeted GitHub.

— CNN’s Jim Sciutto contributed reporting.