Massive cyber attack takes down Twitter, Netflix, Amazon and others

So far we're OK. Cross your fingers everybody

Here's where the reported outages were earlier today

A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that began this morning at 7:10 a.m., targeted at DNS provider Dyn, is continuing to cause Internet outages around the world, but particularly those along the east coast.

Amazon, Twitter, Youtube, Reddit, Xbox Live, PSN, Google, Netflix, Pinterest, Spotify and other major sites are either completely offline or are struggling to stay online.

A DDoS is when criminals target and overwhelm servers with so much junk traffic that they can no longer serve legitimate visitors. Usually these attacks will focus on one service (such as Twitter alone), but in this case, a DNS provider is being targeted.

DNS (domain name service) is the backbone of the Internet. It's the service that tells computers around the world what server a website is on. Dyn happens to serve most of the big names on the Internet, so an attack on their services affects a good chunk of the online world.

No one has claimed responsibility for the attack yet, and the U.S. government says it is "looking at all possible scenarios", including it possibly of a foreign cyber attack.

So far the Village Media network remains unaffected.