People Had a Total Meltdown Over the Internet Outage
Internet users collectively lost it when they reported widespread problems across some popular sites on Friday morning.
The outage, mainly affecting the northeast U.S., seems to have been brought on by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on Dyn, an Internet company that hosts a variety of widely used platforms, though it is currently unclear why this happened.
Writing on its website Friday morning, Dyn said it had been the subject of an attack, adding that “some customers may experience increased DNS query latency and delayed zone propagation during this time.” Service has since been restored, according to DNS status reports.
Services have been restored to normal as of 13:20 UTC.
— Dyn (@Dyn) October 21, 2016
But even though it was just one morning, Internet-reliant people struggled with “that feeling when” they were cut off from the world. As users woke up to find that sites like Twitter, Reddit, Spotify, Paypal, SoudCloud, and several other platforms appeared to go dark or experience problems, several were able to take to Twitter to express a rainbow of emotions on Friday’s access issues.
The consequences were dire for several people, as the information age took a major hit:
#TFW You wake up to Twitter being down & you haven't had your first cup of coffee… pic.twitter.com/t3mdKYDifS
— scott olson (@NJHighlands) October 21, 2016
When there's an outage but you don't get notifications because PagerDuty is down #DDoS pic.twitter.com/VrJQNuDOTJ
— Raquel Hernandez (@raqueldotnyc) October 21, 2016
Looks like Twitter is down again…..now 1 billion people won't know what I had for breakfast.
— Ben duPont (@BenjaminduPont) October 21, 2016
When Twitter is down pic.twitter.com/Ys5julNEsS
— Brian Coulter (@PhilaBCoulter) October 21, 2016
showing up to work this morning in the middle of the #dyndns #DDOS attack: pic.twitter.com/LOVizgiP3s
— Troy McCall (@interzonejunkie) October 21, 2016
Twitter and Netflix are both down in the Northeast I get it fsociety I really do but I just wanted to watch the flash
— Aly (@starsabove0oru) October 21, 2016
Had Twitter go down and my wifi connection start acting funny, all in the same morning pic.twitter.com/Pk1aBdfZSY
— #LetMyPeopleGLO (@MichellCClark) October 21, 2016
https://twitter.com/i/web/status/789449575572529153
Some put forth theories, or criticized the system’s wind preparedness.
Whoever was responsible for this Internet outage was CLEARLY trying to prevent the #Number1HockeyBoy panel from releasing today's rankings.
— Kurt (@Kurt_BSH) October 21, 2016
When it's 2k16 & your 1st world country's ground infrastructure can't handle the wind. What a time to be alive. #poweroutage #internetoutage
— Cy Ch (@cbo_mb) October 9, 2016
Only 18 more days until the end of this #internetoutage. #MAGA
— Cognitive One (@CognitiveOne) October 21, 2016
Others saw the humor in the situation.
Found the source of the internet outage pic.twitter.com/IhQ9dwuJjZ
— come here, francine (@youneverstudied) October 21, 2016
Feel real bad that there's an Internet outage in the Northeast. pic.twitter.com/ejhiWaTM27
— Brian (@Briligerent) October 21, 2016
Dyn dinged by DDoS: US DNS firm gives web a bad hair day https://t.co/pLEJg2xKhy @TheRegister pic.twitter.com/23oSE0Gf2j
— Omar Santos (@santosomar) October 21, 2016
apparently half the internet shut down today due to a DDOS. we all know who did it pic.twitter.com/T8QaaJoB5I
— クリス (@innersolo) October 21, 2016
At least one kind soul offered comfort to those affected:
#hugops to everyone affected by the Dyn ddos today. pic.twitter.com/rXP5IPDcfS
— 💕brandon🚜burton✨ (@solarce) October 21, 2016