This is what happened on Friday, as major tech companies like Twitter, Netflix, Reddit, Amazon, Spotify — which are catered to by major DNS service-provider called DYN — suffered malfunctions in their service, an internet outage, because of a malware attack. Dyn, one of the nation's largest domain name system (DNS) providers, confirmed a large-scale hack took down more than a dozen major websites early Friday, slowing—and in some cases halting—internet traffic to, Twitter, Pandora, Netflix, Pinterest, Reddit, Spotify, PayPal and the PlayStation Network.“We have been aggressively mitigating the DDoS attack against our infrastructure,” Scott Hilton, a vice president at Dyn, said in a statement provided to The Atlantic. This malware, now identified as 'Mirai', essentially infects Internet-of-Things devices, floods them with artificial commands and causes them to shut down under a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack — which means that the devices simply go dead and refuse to perform their functions because of server overload. “This is not some hacker sitting in his basement typing away on a keyboard.”

The attack was said to put a troubling new spin on an old hacker attack known as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), where millions of devices in the fast-growing Internet of things took part in the cyber onslaught. U.S. officials told Reuters that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were investigating.
A series of cyberattacks utilizing distributed denial-of-service attacks, targeting networks operated by DNS provider Dyn, makes major Internet platforms and services unavailable to large swaths of users in Europe and North America. Affected companies include Amazon, Twitter, Spotify, Reddit, PayPal, Netflix, and Airbnb.