Oracle Acquires Dyn - A Supereme DNS Provider in $600+ Million

Business software vendor Oracle announced on Monday that it is buying cloud-based Internet performance and Domain Name System (DNS) provider Dyn.

Dyn is the same company that was hit by a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack by the Mirai botnet last month which knocked the entire Internet offline for a few hours, crippling some of the world's biggest and most popular websites.

Since the company provides cloud-based DNS service to customers such as Spotify, Netflix, Twitter and Pfizer, the acquisition will help Oracle's cloud customers to optimize their infrastructure costs and performance.

According to the press release, the Dyn acquisition "extends the Oracle cloud computing platform and provides enterprise customers with a one-stop shop for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)."

"Oracle Cloud customers will have unique access to Internet performance information that will help them optimize infrastructure costs, maximize application and website-driven revenue, and manage risk," said Kyle York, chief strategy officer of Dyn.

The company said Dyn's immensely scalable and global DNS is not just a critical core component but also provides a natural extension to Oracle's cloud computing platform.

So, the deal would help its cloud customers improve access and page-load speeds for their websites using internet performance information.

Oracle did not disclose the acquisition amount it paid for Dyn, but a source close to the deal told Fortune that Oracle paid somewhere between $600 Million and $700 Million to acquire Dyn.

Dan Primack reported that Oracle paid around $600 million for Dyn, though Dyn has yet to respond to a request for comment.

Oracle is far behind Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is the market leader in the infrastructure cloud computing market. The deal would potentially make the company compete with Amazon's AWS and on Microsoft's Azure – Route 53 and Azure DNS.

Most Popular DNS Server 'Dyn' attacked by DDOS - Popular Sites get offline

Cyber attacks are getting evil and worst nightmare for companies day-by-day, and the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is one such attacks that cause a massive damage to any service.

Recently, the Internet witnessed a record-breaking largest DDoS attack of over 1 Tbps against France-based hosting provider OVH, and now the latest victim of the attack is none other than Dyn DNS provider.

A sudden outage of popular sites and services, including Twitter, SoundCloud, Spotify, and Shopify, for many users, is causing uproar online. It's because of a DDoS attack against the popular Domain Name System (DNS) service provider Dyn, according to a post on Ycombinator.

DNS act as the authoritative reference for mapping domain names to IP addresses. In other words, DNS is simply an Internet's phone book that resolves human-readable web addresses, like thehackernews.com, against IP addresses.

Dyn DNS is used by many websites and services as their upstream DNS provider, including Twitter, Spotify, SaneBox, Reddit, Box, Github, Zoho CRM, PayPal, Airbnb, Freshbooks, Wired.com, Pinterest, Heroku and Vox Media properties.

All of these sites and services are reportedly experiencing outages and downtime, either completely or partially.

According to Dyn DNS, the DDOS started at 11:10 UTC and is mostly affecting its customers in the East Coast of the United States, specifically Managed DNS customers.

"We are aware of the ongoing service interruption of our Managed DNS network. For more information visit our status page," Dyn tweeted.

At the time, it's not clear who is behind this DDoS attack, but the company said its engineers are working on "mitigating" the issue.

Here's the statement posted by Dyn on its website:

"This attack is mainly impacting US East and is impacting Managed DNS customers in this region. Our Engineers are continuing to work on mitigating this issue.

Starting at 11:10 UTC on October 21th-Friday 2016 we began monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure. Some customers may experience increased DNS query latency and delayed zone propagation during this time. Updates will be posted as information becomes available.

Customers with questions or concerns are encouraged to reach out to our Technical Support Team."

What websites are down for you? Let us know in the comments below.