Major Morning Outage for Twitter, Airbnb, Shopify and more

Early this morning some of the internet’s most popular sites were unreachable due to a significant outage of DNS provider Dyn, as a result of a DDOS attack, according to a post on Hacker News.

Twitter users reported a DNS error message, although the issue was much bigger than Twitter. On its status page, Amazon Web Services status page said it was looking into “elevated errors resolving DNS host names used to access some AWS services” operating out of data centers in Northern Virginia.

Several other sites were affected, including Airbnb, Shopify, Spotify, Box, Etsy, New York Times, Github, Reddit, and Freshbooks.

DNS stands for Domain Name System, which translates human friendly domain names (like techvibes.com) into number sequences which are recognizable to the systems that run the Internet. If the DNS system is faulty, sites become inaccessible.

At 9:36AM EST, Dyn reported that “Services have been restored to normal as of 13:20 UTC.”