Dyn
More info
- Released
- 2001
- Owner
- Oracle (since 2016)
- Type
- DNS provider
The DNS company half the American internet quietly depended on, as everyone learned the day its nameservers stopped answering.
It grew out of DynDNS, a late-1990s free service that gave home users with a changing IP address a stable hostname. The company was formed in New Hampshire in 2001 and moved into paid, anycast-based DNS for businesses. Its customers included Twitter, Netflix, GitHub, Reddit and Spotify.
On 21 October 2016 the Mirai botnet buried Dyn's nameservers under traffic from hundreds of thousands of hijacked security cameras and routers. The sites themselves were fine, but nobody could look up their addresses, so for large parts of North America and Europe they were effectively down for hours. Oracle bought the company that autumn. The lesson that stuck: use more than one DNS provider.