Photo: Bloomberg

A number of popular websites on Friday fell victim to a string of apparent cyber attacks.

Twitter, Netflix, Amazon, Reddit, Spotify, Soundcloud, Airbnb and Etsy were among the major sites targeted, as were news publications such as The New York Times, the Boston Globe and Vox.

According to CNN, Dyn, which manages website domains and routes internet traffic, suffered multiple distributed denial of service attacks on its DNS servers. A DDoS attack is an attempt to flood a website with bogus traffic in an effort to cripple the site or worse.

Initially, the attacks were believed to be concentrated mostly on the East Coast, starting around 7 a.m. EST, but by this afternoon, there were reports of outages on the West Coast and in Europe as well.

In a statement obtained by Variance, Dyn said services had "been restored to normal" by 9:20 a.m. EST, but as of 2 p.m. EST, the company had revised its status, noting it is monitoring and investigating "several attacks aimed against the Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure."

“This was not your everyday DDos attack,” Kyle York, Dyn’s chief strategist, said Friday afternoon. “The nature and source of the attack is still under investigation."