Federal officials are monitoring reports of at least two cyber attacks that took down pages and services across the internet on Friday. One of the attacks is ongoing as of 2 p.m. EDT.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the Department of Homeland Security, which monitors cyber threats against the United States, is monitoring the situation.
"At this point, I don't have any information to share about who might be responsible for this malicious activity," Earnest said.
The outages appear to have stemmed from dedicated denial of service (DDOS) attacks levied against Dyn Inc., one of the world's foremost providers of internet services. The company runs domain name servers, known commonly as DNS, which provide infrastructure for internet services.
"They (DNS) work as a phone book or map to the internet, making sure that when someone writes an address into their computer or phone, it can be directed to the right place and show the right information," The Independent reported.
Dyn confirmed that it started monitoring and fighting an attack on its infrastructure around 7 a.m. The company announced that services has been restored by 9:20 a.m.
However, a second attack was reported just before 12 p.m., again targeting Dyn's infrastructure.
"Our engineers continue to investigate and mitigate several attacks aimed against the Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure," the company said in an update posted just before 2 p.m.
It was not immediately clear whether the attacks were related.
Dyn is based in New Hampshire; However, it provides services for multiple U.S.-based sites, and the attack on its servers caused issues loading the American sites in parts of Europe, Japan and other places, according to outage maps from Down Detector.
Sites took to social media to announce the issues.
The earlier issues have resurfaced & some people may still be having trouble accessing Twitter. We’re working on it! https://t.co/1soA6QV9mH
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) October 21, 2016
We’re aware of some issues right now and are checking them out! We’ll keep you posted.
— Spotify Status (@SpotifyStatus) October 21, 2016
Because this is such a widespread issue, we have no ETA for when these problems will be resolved, but we have our engineers on deck to help!
— Storify (@Storify) October 21, 2016
A DDOS attack occurs when a website gets an influx of requests meant to overload the site and make it inaccessible.
Cox Media Group