Cyberattacks take down Twitter, Netflix, Spotify

A wave of Friday cyberattacks on a New Hampshire-based internet firm took down a number of popular websites on the east coast — including Twitter, Netflix, Visa and Spotify.

The firm, Dyn, Inc., said its infrastructure was hit by "distributed denial-of-service" attacks on Friday morning — which affected its internet traffic management for the websites, according to the Associated Press. Dyn serves 6 percent of U.S. Fortune 500 companies — so the outage was felt widely.

The company became aware of the attacks starting around 7 a.m. Eastern, and its services were restored by about 9 a.m. — but another attack came a few hours later.

The attack is a troubling example of hacks that could become more frequent, the AP reported:

In a widely shared essay titled "Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet," respected security expert Bruce Schneier said last month that major internet infrastructure companies were seeing a series of worrying denial-of-service attacks.

"Someone is extensively testing the core defensive capabilities of the companies that provide critical internet services," he said.

The Department of Homeland Security was “monitoring the situation," White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said, but he didn't give any other information about a U.S. response to the attack.

The attack is “consistent with record-setting sized cyberattacks seen in the last few weeks,” Carl Herberger, vice president of security at Radware, told USA Today.