Cyber Attack Slows US Access to Popular Sites

Internet users on the U.S. east coast experienced sluggish surfing on several popular websites as a result of a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack, according to service provider Dyn.

“This morning, October 21, Dyn received a global DDoS attack on our Managed DNS infrastructure in the east coast of the United States,” according to a statement from Dyn, an Internet performance management company. “DNS traffic resolved from east coast name server locations are experiencing a service interruption during this time. Updates will be posted as information becomes available.”

Sites affected include Twitter, SoundCloud, Spotify, Airbnb and Reddit.

Users in Europe and Asia appear not to have been affected by the problem.

In a DDOS attack computers flood a targeted system sucking up all the bandwidth, leaving regular users unable to connect or to connect at significantly slower speeds. The attacks are usually caused by compromised systems.

According to Dyn, the issues started at 11:10 UTC Friday.