Due to a global Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack against the DNS infrastructure of Dyn, Inc. (see press release), several major internet sites are suffering from varying degrees of outage this morning (Friday, October 21st, 2016). Affected sites suffering from the outage which may impact our clients’ businesses include:
- PayPal
- Shopify
- Twitter
- Spotify
- … and many others.
This outage seems to be affecting customers primarily on the U.S. East Coast. Users accessing these sites might have more or less success depending on where they’re located, as some European and Asian users seem not to be encountering these issues.
A DDoS attack occurs when computers flood targets systems with spurious requests. In this case, the attack is targeting the Domain Name System (DNS) of a major DNS provider. This system is responsible for converting friendly domain names such as bcsengineering.com into the IP addresses of the destination computers which host that sites services.
As of 9:15am EDT, Dyn, Inc. has announced that they have restored full DNS functionality.
Expect for some minor issues to continue throughout the morning as sites work to address follow-on issues related to the outage, however, we expect things will be back to normal relatively soon.
If you are experiencing issues with any X-Cart modules built by BCS Engineering, such as the PayPal DPM module, please contact via our support ticket system. While we expect any issues that you are experiencing will be resolved by PayPal shortly, we are happy to look into the issue for your further.
We are monitoring the situation and will update this post with further information as it becomes available.
