Twitter, Shopify, Paypal and many sites inaccessible Friday 21 October 2016

bysubra

462 followers

9 years ago

We all depend on the availability, that is accessibility, of sites we use regularly or may need from time to time. 'We' includes Wealthy Affiliate members, and our prospects and customers.

I am sharing here information about some very popular sites being unavailable today, Friday 21 October 2016. This outage seemed to be focused on the US East Coast and was caused by a "hacking" attack on a domain names service provider. Sites impacted include Twitter, Easy, SoundCloud, Spotify, Shopify, Reddit, Netflix, Paypal and a "host of other sites". The latter apparently includes several news sites. Affected sites include CNN, the Guardian, CircleCl, ZenDesk, Intercom, BrainTree. DYN, Github, Heroku, Imgur, Yelp and Pagerduty.

My initial source is https://mic.com which sent me a push notification about the issue in an article. Here is the link to the (updated) article:

https://mic.com/articles/157348/twitter-down-ddos-attack-brings-down-soundcloud-spotify-shopify-and-a-host-of-others?

I read it about four hours ago, and after some thought decided I ought to share it here. As I was drafting the post I re-visited the article. The article now reflects an update showing the geographical area affected by the "internet services" outage, and in saying the issue has been addressed as of 1-20PM Friday GMT (UTC).

The article MAY still be relevant to those who get something like this image (borrowed from the mic.com article) below when they try to access a site:

The article's author (Melanie Ehrenkranz, a writer covering technology and the future, who can be reached at melanie@mic.com (Follow @melaniehannah) suggests you try this to resolve the problem:

'If you keep getting the sad-trombone "This site can't be reached" page and hear your friends talking about their fire tweets, this might be because your device has "cached the DNS response" for the aforementioned sites, as the Hacker News post mentions. Clear your cache and try again, or switch your DNS to Google Public.'

I hope the above is of use to some of us at Wealthy Affiliate.

I believe we should "briefly" share details of such outages or issues via the blog, 'ask a question' or other mechanism so that others may benefit from such warnings. Or perhaps we should highlight it to WA's Technical Support who could then decide how best to update us and people who access our sites. This would probably avoid 'false alarms' or 'uninformed warnings'.

I did a quick confirmation of Melanie's article by searching on Google. The following link helps explain this issue further, especially why many users outside of the US East Coast were affected: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/10/21/h... .

You may also try https://www.hackread.com/ddos-attack-dns-sites-suf... .

I was participating in a webinar early this morning that I believe was hosted on the US East Coast when I "lost" my connection to the site hosting the webinar. I do not know if it was related to this specific outage reported by mic.com. Did the reported "DDoS" (distributed denial-of-service) attack on a major service provider impact other traffic originating from the East Coast? I do intend to find out. Or perhaps understand a little more.

Did anyone reading this experience the outage?

My thanks for the push notification to Melanie and mic.com. I have depended heavily on your post and update for this piece. A thousand thanks!.

Author Email Address: subras.ejr@gmail.com