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The internet was dealt a crippling blow Friday morning as major websites, including Twitter, Spotify and Reddit were inaccessible.

As sites and services across the East Coast began to recover, word came of a possible second wave of attacks.

We are continuing to mitigate a DDoS against our Managed DNS network. For more information visit our status page. — Dyn (@Dyn) October 21, 2016

The culprit in both cases appeared to be a DDOS — that's distributed denial of service — attack on Dyn, an internet performance management company.

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Domain host company Dyn said the attack started at 7:10 a.m. and lasted for more than two hours.

It affected Dyn's Managed Domain Name System infrastructure, which serves companies including Amazon, Twitter, Spotify and CNBC.com.

A DDOS attack essentially floods a target with artificial traffic, knocking it offline.

It remains unclear who is behind the attacks — but the interruptions sent the internet into a tizzy.

showing up to work this morning in the middle of the #dyndns #DDOS attack: pic.twitter.com/LOVizgiP3s — Troy McCall (@interzonejunkie) October 21, 2016

While some were light-hearted, others peddled conspiracy theories...

POTUS blames Russia for DNC hacks. Launches (and announces?) "Cyber attack" on Russia. Northeast internet outage days later. We're losing... — Le Curve (@WillardOfOdds) October 21, 2016

The Dyn Inc. #DDoS attack could possibly be a test for something bigger closer to the #Election2016. I hope there's load-balancing. — Joshua Harr (@sparta_josh) October 21, 2016

... while others reminded us that with no Twitter, we were instead forced to make Friday small talk with our co-workers.