Update 6:20 PM ET: Dyn now says the incident is resolved. The company also confirmed that Internet of Things devices played a role in the attacks.

Update 12:35 PM ET: As of 11:52 AM ET, the attacks have resumed.

If you've noticed some issues getting your favorite sites to load this morning it's not just in your head. A broad swath of the internet was under attack from hackers this morning from about 7:10 to 9:20 AM EST, and it caused a ton of outages.

The actual attack was focused on a company you've probably never heard of, Dyn, which runs Domain Name Servers. These are the systems that do the incredibly important job of translating the URLs that you type into your address bar—like www.popularmechanics.com—into the complex jumbles of numbers that the computers use to identify each other behind the scenes.

If a site's URL is a site's name, a DNS server is the phonebook, but more complicated. A site isn't just one place, but a whole network of computers, each with their own address which can sometimes change. Without a proper DNS server, you can type the correct URL for a website that is actually up and working, but it won't load because your computer can't figure out to get in touch with it. Dyn runs the DNS servers for a lot of websites, and if it is down, the sites that rely on it are basically dead in the water, or need to switch to a different server.

This morning between 7 and 9 AM EST, hackers blasted Dyn with so much traffic that it couldn't possibly keep up, in what's known as DDoS attack.

It's difficult to tell who is responsible for this attack at the moment, but it comes on the heels of some seriously eerie warnings from security professionals who have recently seen a series of probes all across the internet, which appear to be testing for weaknesses. Whether or not this attack is related, DNS servers certainly are a weakness. By concentrating firepower on the servers that let your computer talk to websites, hackers can make hundreds or thousands of website inaccessible without having to take them down.

The attack may be over for now, but it could just be a sign of worse things to come.

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