Cyberattacks reported early this morning continued to expand across the nation throughout the day — taking down popular web sites and disrupting Internet service.
According to news reports across the country, the attacks disrupted PayPal, Spotify, Amazon, NetFlixs, CNN, Mashable, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Yelp, People.com and more.
Both Homeland Security and the FBI are investigating.
CBS News reports that service has been restored following hours of internet disruption Friday morning across the East Coast of the United States.
A wave of reports of problems accessing many popular websites came after the servers at a major internet management firm were hit by a cyberattack.
New Hampshire-based Dyn said its server infrastructure suffered a distributed denial-of-service attack, which occurs when a system is overwhelmed by malicious electronic traffic.
The company issued a series of statements about the service disruption early Friday local time, finally tweeting that as of 9:20 a.m. ET, “services have been restored to normal.”
In a statement provided to CBS News, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said it was aware of the attack and is “investigating all potential causes.”
The level of disruption caused was hard to gauge, but Dyn provides internet traffic optimization to some of the biggest names on the web, including Twitter, Netflix and Visa.
The site Downdetector.com, which tracks service outages, lit up with reports of problems accessing Twitter and other sites Friday morning.
Red zones on the map from Downdetector.com indicate widespread reports of Twitter outages Friday morning, Oct. 21, 2016.
CNET reports Twitter saw a two-hour window when “various Twitter domains including twitter.com may have been inaccessible for users in some regions, due to failures resolving particular DNS hostnames,” the company said.
Several sites, such as coder hangout Github, said they were experiencing problems, although it was not immediately clear whether the issues were linked to the cyberattack.