Apparent cyberattack downs some major websites

Outages at a slew of websites may have been the job of cyberattackers.

According to TechCrunch.com, service on Twitter, SoundCloud, Spotify, Soundify, Box, Boston Globe, New York Times, Github, Airbnb, Reddit, Freshbooks, Heroku and Vox Media properties was interrupted Friday.

An outage at Dyn, a major domain name server host, was the result of a distributed denial of service or DDoS attack, according to a post on Hacker News.

DNS hosts maintain a directory of domain names and translate them to Internet Protocol or IP addresses. Computers access websites based on IP addresses. A DDoS attack isn't a hack. The attack basically overwhelms the servers.

This attack mainly impacted the east coast of the United States.

The Dyn website reported service was restored but then later said it was experiencing more attacks.

"Starting at 11:10 UTC on October 21st-Friday 2016 we began monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure. Some customers may experience increased DNS query latency and delayed zone propagation during this time. Updates will be posted as information becomes available."

Gizmodo reported the following sites were disrupted:

ActBlue

Basecamp

Big cartel

Box

Business Insider

CNN

Cleveland.com

Esty

Github

Grubhub

Guardian.co.uk

HBO Now

Iheart.com (iHeartRadio)

Imgur

Intercom

Intercom.com

Okta

PayPal

People.com

Pinterest

Playstation Network

Recode

Reddit

Spotify

Squarespace Customer Sites

Starbucks rewards/gift cards

Storify.com

The Verge

Twillo

Twitter

Urbandictionary.com (lol)

Weebly

Wired.com

Wix Customer Sites

Yammer

Yelp

Zendesk.com

Zoho CRM