4th Update: 20 min video response by Dale Drew, the chief security officer of Internet backbone company Level 3.

3rd Update: More details emerging “that some of the infrastructure responsible for the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against Dyn DNS were botnets compromised by Mirai malware.” says Flashpoint. I’ll continue to update with additional information and important links.

2nd Update: 3rd Attack underway. I’m just going to post this and proof read later.

Update: Just as I finished writing this, I had to change the title. This is because, initially, the internet outage this morning was for the most part over. Caused by an attack “of unknown origin” on DNS service provider DYN it took down large chunks of the internet. But DYN just announced that they are under “attack” again! Twitter, Reddit and other sites are offline yet again.

This morning I found it strange that Pingdom, the very service I use to monitor up time of web servers and websites, was unavailable. Then after a few mins of investigation, I realized that this was eerily similar to what I told my cousin would happen in the near future during our late night drive to the Florida Keys over a year ago. Namely, the shutdown of the ‘internet’ in the US for a least a few hours and the possible fallout if that were to happen. Ok, today was not a mass shutdown. However, have a look at DownDetector’s outage map from this morning:

To my recollection, this is the largest attack and subsequent outage ever. Here are just a few of the major website’s and services affected today: businessinsider.com, FT.com, Cloudflare.com, uptimerobot.com, ActBlue, Basecamp, Cleveland.com, Etsy, Github, Big cartel, Box, Business Insider, CNN, Grubhub, Guardian.co.uk, HBO Now, Iheart.com, Imgur, Intercom.com, Okta, PayPal, People.com, Pingdom, Pinterest, Playstation Network, Recode, Reddit, Seamless, Spotify, Squarespace, Starbucks, Spotify.com, The Verge, Twillo, Twitter, Weebly, Wired.com, Wix, Yammer, Yelp, Zendesk.com, Zoho CRM, Credit Karma, Eventbrite, Netflix, NHL.com, Fox ews, Disqus, Shopify, Soundcloud, Atom.io, Ancersty.com, ConstantContact, Indeed.com, New York Times, Weather.com, WSJ.com, time.com, xbox.com, dailynews.com, Wikia, donorschoose.org, Wufoo.com, Genonebiology.com, BBC, Elder Scrolls Online, Eve Online, PagerDuty, Kayak, youneedabudget.com, Speed Test, Freshbooks, Braintree, Blue Host, Qualtrics, SBNation, Salsify.com, Zillow.com… you get the point.

U.S. officials told Reuters that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were investigating. These disruptions come at a time of unprecedented fears about the cyber threat in the United States, where hackers have breached political organizations and election agencies.

The Beginning of a New Era in Cyber Attacks

You won’t see much about this on TV new networks such as Fox News, CNN, NBC, etc. CNN briefly said a few hours ago that everything is back to normal and returned to politics. A clear example of why the internet and open access to it is vitally important for all of us! Details of how this attack happened are still pretty much nonexistent. One thing for sure, this will only help to attract similar and even more sophisticated attacks capable of disrupting the internet enough to impact critical services, stock markets and scenarios we have yet to think about. We may hear about some of these tomorrow and in the days to come.

Strange enough, today also marks the launch of the Word War 1 game BattleField 1 on PC and Console.