Other platforms like Playstation network were also affected by the outage. Google and Facebook were unaffected.

The disruption was due to a coordinated assault on some of the underlying infrastructure that powers the internet.

Dyn, one of the several companies responsible for hosting the crucial web directory known as the Domain Name System (dNS), suffered a sustained called distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, causing many people to lose access to specific sites and the internet entirely.

A DDoS attack means hackers hijack vast numbers of internet-connected devices to swamp a victim's website with so much junk traffic that it is unable to cope.

Dyn said the attack began just after 12pm. the company indicated that the issue was fixed by 2:30 Pm, but the assault began again a couple of hours later, just before 7PM. It still isn’t clear where the cyber-attack originated.