Cyber Attack Takes Down Major Sites Including Twitter, Spotify, SoundCloud

A cyber attack took down major websites, including Twitter, Spotify, and SoundCloud, on Friday morning, TechCrunch reports. The cause of outages, which are mostly concentrated in the eastern United States, seems to be the result of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on Dyn, a major domain host. Gizmodo has posted an explainer on the situation.

In a statement, the White House press secretary said that the Department of Homeland Security is investigating the cyber attack. Other sites affected include Box, Boston Globe, New York Times, Github, Airbnb, Reddit, Freshbooks, Heroku and Vox Media properties. DNS provider Dyn said that they had been "monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure" as early as 7 a.m. EST on Friday morning.

This story is developing and will be updated as new information becomes available.