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Features
2016/10

The Internet Is Under Attack: PSN, Disqus, Twitter , Paypal Are Down

[Update 10/21/2016 @ 16:38:] Service for Paypal, Disqus, Bluehost, and Twitter on the North American east coast has been restored.

[Original article:] A DDoS attack happening across the entire internet has caused outages from major websites. These outages include the PlayStation Network, Disqus, Twitter, Paypal and more. This means that communication on a lot of digital fronts is unavailable.

You may have been trying to rage-comment on your favorite topic in Disqus and found that you were unable to. You may have found that you tried looking up a solution on Twitter and you weren’t able to. You may have found that you tried to get some money out of Paypal to buy an old N64, and you weren’t able to. Well, that’s because they’re being DDoS’d and it’s been that way all morning long.

According to Forbes, domain name server host Dyn is being hit hard by a denial of service attack, so much so that a bunch of sites using the DNS to resolve hosts aren’t able to and therefore a lot of people are left out of the communication loop. It’s almost like something out of the show Mr. Robot.

Things briefly came back online for a while but they didn’t last long for PSN users. But PSN being down likely wouldn’t send off any red flags because it’s always down.

However, you may have noticed that if you tried commenting about content on this site or using Twitter or trying to search up certain info on Google has been a fruitless endeavor… well, that’s why.

According to NBC News, Homeland Security is looking into the matter and they’ll try to get to the bottom of it. This isn’t just a Lizard Squad attack set to make gamers cry online about not being able to play via Xbox Live or PSN or on Battle.net, this is the real deal and a lot of people across the great wide web are being affected by it.

Hopefully these issues don’t persist for too long because otherwise cooler heads will prevail during rage-bait topics, people will have to go outside and get exercise instead of sitting around waiting for PSN to come back online, and people might actually have to communicate face to face if Twitter isn’t back up. Then again, maybe the outage isn’t all that bad?

(Main image courtesy of Sactown Royalty)

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