SPOTIFY, SOUNDCLOUD AND MORE DOWNED BY CYBER ATTACK

Spotify, SoundCloud and many other popular websites such as Twitter and Paypal were briefly shutdown on Friday, when a huge wave of cyber attacks on a company called Dyn took place.

Based in New Hampshire, US, Dyn provides DNS (Domain Name System) services, which help websites connect with computers attempting to access them. The attacks, known as a DDoS (distributed denial of service), sent tens of millions of requests to Dyn, causing the company's system to collapse.

As Dyn provides services to a whole range of websites across the US (particularly on the East Coast), including those mentioned above, the attack had the knock-on effect of bringing these down as well.

Dyn described the DDoS as a “very sophisticated and complex attack" and are still trying to fully rectify the problems, although the issues with the other websites were fixed after the initial attack on Friday morning.