UPDATE 2: Spotify, SoundCloud, Twitter and other major sites were down or loading slowly all day on Friday thanks to a massive Distributed Denial Of Services (DD0S) attack. By Friday evening the problem had been resolved according to the subject of the attack, managed DNS provider DYN.
Other sites affected through out the day included the Boston Globe, New York Times, Github, Shopify, Airbnb, Box, Freshbooks, Heroku and Vox Media. While the first attacks appeared to be worse in the U.S. east coast, eventually it spread west and to Europe as well.
While the source of the attacks has not been named, with the help of other infrastructure companies Akamai and Flashpoint, Dyn determined that some of the traffic used in the attacks came from the Mirai botnet, a network of infected Internet of Things devices that has been used in other major DDoS attacks, according to TechCrunch.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is monitoring the situation and “investigating all potential causes” of the outages.
By Friday evening, DNS reported that they had kicked all of the attackers off its service. Get the latest status update from DYN here.