Several of the world’s best-known websites were inaccessible across parts of the United States on Friday after hackers unleashed a series of attacks on a company that acts as a switchboard for the internet.
The attacks affected access to Twitter, Paypal, Spotify and other customers of the infrastructure company in New Hampshire called Dyn, which processes large volumes of internet traffic.
“The attacks came in waves,” Al Jazeera’s Rob Reynolds, reporting from Los Angeles, said. “First targeting the East Coast of the United States, spreading then to the other parts of the country and even to Western Europe.”
“The websites that were disrupted were some of the top names in the internet: CNN and the New York Times, AirBnB, Reddit, HBO… a whole variety of sites were attacked.”
“Dyn is kind of a middle man that directs users to different websites and routes traffic from server to server in a complex way,” said Reynolds.
