If you’re having trouble getting onto PlayStation Network or watching Luke Cage, that’s probably not Sony’s or Netflix’s fault.
A coordinated cyberattack has hit a large sector of the internet, and that has made services like PlayStation Network, Netflix, and Twitter inaccessible for a significant number of people. Earlier today, a distributed denial-of-service assault hit domain name system (DNS) service Dyn. That is preventing many heavily trafficked sites from loading for people around the world.
That earlier attack subsided for a few hours, but it has returned and is affecting sites that serve millions of users and customers.
“As of 15:52 UTC, we have begun monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure,” reads an update on the DynStatus page. “Our Engineers are continuing to work on mitigating this issue.”
The DynDNS is one link in a chain that enables the internet to function. It enables your browser to understand that when you type something like “netflix.com,” you want to go to a certain IP address. By assaulting the Dyn system, however, this cyberattack is preventing that connection from happening. Affected services include:
- Netflix
- Spotify
- PlayStation Network
DynDNS is one of the largest and most crucial nameservers, but it is not the only one. That is why something like PSN, which seems to heavily rely on the DYN, is having so many issues and Xbox Live is not.
Various internet service providers also bake in their own DNS solutions, and you can even set your network to check in with specific nameservers like OpenDNS. But since these switchboards of the web are so interdependent, one going down can cause the others to collapse.
Updated at 1:25 p.m. Pacific time.