A major cyberattack brought down numerous major American websites Friday, including The New York Times, Twitter, Etsy, Tumblr, Spotify, Comcast, and more. The pages were down for at least two hours Friday morning before being downed again in the afternoon.
How was it possible to take down all those sites at once?Someone attacked the architecture that held them together — the domain-name system, or DNS, the technical network that redirects users from easy-to-remember addresses like theatlantic.com to a company's actual web servers. The assault took the form of a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) on one of the major companies that provides other companies access to DNS. A DDoS attack is one in which an attacker floods sites "with so much junk traffic that it can no longer serve legitimate visitors," as the security researcher Brian Krebs put it in a blog post Friday morning. [The Atlantic]
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
Economists fear US inflation data less reliablespeed read The Labor Department is collecting less data for its consumer price index due to staffing shortages
-
Crypto firm Coinbase hacked, faces SEC scrutinySpeed Read The Securities and Exchange Commission has also been investigating whether Coinbase misstated its user numbers in past disclosures
-
Starbucks baristas strike over dress codespeed read The new uniform 'puts the burden on baristas' to buy new clothes, said a Starbucks Workers United union delegate
-
Warren Buffet announces surprise retirementspeed read At the annual meeting of Berkshire Hathaway, the billionaire investor named Vice Chairman Greg Abel his replacement
-
Trump calls Amazon's Bezos over tariff displaySpeed Read The president was not happy with reports that Amazon would list the added cost from tariffs alongside product prices
-
Markets notch worst quarter in years as new tariffs loomSpeed Read The S&P 500 is on track for its worst month since 2022 as investors brace for Trump's tariffs
-
Tesla Cybertrucks recalled over dislodging panelsSpeed Read Almost every Cybertruck in the US has been recalled over a stainless steel panel that could fall off
-
Crafting emporium Joann is going out of businessSpeed Read The 82-year-old fabric and crafts store will be closing all 800 of its stores
