US Homeland Security ‘investigating all potential causes’ after mass internet disruptions

The US Department of Homeland Security is investigating after a major internet provider came under cyber-attack, disrupting major sites such as Twitter and Spotify.

The internet service company Dyn said it had suffered a denial of service (DDoS) attack on its domain name service shortly after 10pm last night (AEDT), but that services had been restored in about two hours.

US Homeland Security continues to investigate who was responsible for the server hacking which mainly affected users in the US East Coast, Time reported.

“We are investigating all potential causes,” Gillian Christiansen from the US Department of Homeland Security said.

Other sites affected by the unexpected outages reportedly included Paypal, SoundCloud, AirBnb, Netflix and online shopping site Amazon, according to CNBC.

"This morning, October 21, Dyn received a global DDoS attack on our Managed DNS infrastructure in the east coast of the United States," said Scott Hilton, executive vice president for products at Dyn, in a statement.

"DNS traffic resolved from east coast name server locations are experiencing a service degradation or intermittent interruption during this time," Mr Hilton added.

"We have been aggressively mitigating the DDoS attack against our infrastructure."

The company said it also conducting internal investigations.

Distributed denial of service or DDoS attacks involve sending high volumes of requests to websites which can be taken offline as a result.

Domain Name Services are a crucial element of internet infrastructure, converting numbered Internet Protocol addresses into the domain names that allow users to connect to internet sites.

With AFP