NEW YORK, N.Y. — If you’ve been having trouble sending and receiving email, listening to music on Spotify, securing a reservation on Airbnb or venting your frustration and searching for answers on Reddit Friday [some sites of which are back online as of 3:37 p.m.], you are not alone. According to Wired magazine, Dyn, a website domain managing company that also routes Internet traffic, was hit with two distributed denial of service attacks on its Domain Name System servers.

A DDoS attack on a DNS server is described as the flooding of a website with so much traffic that it impairs normal service. In this case, the first DDoS attack to Dyn, headquartered in New Hampshire, came at around 7 a.m. The trouble it caused was resolved in a couple of hours, but then another DDoS attack began occurring just before noon, according to Wired, and the trouble it’s caused continues into the afternoon Friday.

According to Wired, a company like Dyn, offering DNS services, “essentially acts as an address book for the Internet. DNS is a system that resolves the web addresses we see every day, like https://www.WIRED.com, into the IP addresses needed to find and connect with the right servers so browsers can deliver requested content, like the story you're reading right now. A DDoS attack overwhelms a DNS server with lookup requests, rendering it incapable of completing any. That's what makes attacking DNS so effective; rather than targeting individual sites, an attacker can take out the entire Internet for any end user whose DNS requests route through a given server.”

According to reports, the East Coast was originally the only area feeling the affects of the major Internet service disruption, but by midday, “people in Europe were reporting outages as well.”

Because a DDoS attack is all about overwhelming a server with too many requests, those of us hitting “refresh” over and over again are only adding to the problem. So sit back and leave your email alone, and don’t visit websites you already know you can’t access.

Reach Editorial Director Holly S. Edwards at hollyedwards@penbaypilot.com and 207-706-6655.