How we may've made Friday's massive internet outage worse
If you kept trying to access Twitter, Reddit, Spotify or Netflix during Friday's massive internet outage, you were part of the problem.
Dyn, the company that manages traffic for those sites and that toppled under a huge cyberattack last week explained in a blog post Wednesday how it all went wrong.
Innocent attempts to reload pages on the sites just made things worse, the company said, causing servers to refresh their caches and creating "a storm of legitimate retry activity." "When...traffic congestion occurs, legitimate retries can further contribute to traffic volume," wrote Scott Hilton, Dyn's executive vice president of product. "We saw both attack and legitimate traffic coming from millions of [computing devices] across all geographies."
