Just because it didn't effect you directly doesn't mean it wasn't a big deal. I'm in Nashville and was not effected, but I'm not writing it off as a non-event. The worrying thing is hacked IoT devices were militarized (just using this as a term, not saying this was a state actor, though it very well could have been.)

Imagine if the hack occurs again, but is more targeted towards things that aren't just minor annoyances, and maybe happens on election night in the U.S.; I mean just earlier this year a repo on a package manager being deleted caused mass failure across the world of applications. A targeted attack on certain assets or dependencies could be very bad indeed. I would argue that GitHub being effected was more important than the other consumer based services in this attack. This is the first of many similar attacks in the coming years.

I think you're right that losing access to Github is a serious problem. I'm worried that an attack like this could be used in conjunction with some zero-day. Imagine a bunch of distributed teams trying to deploy a fix to the next rails zero-day yaml parsing RCE with GitHub and slack down.

Militarized? You were as affected as I was which is not at all, don't you wonder if this is just mass media trying to incite bullshit?

It's not bullshit though, the threat is real and something needs to be incited amongst the public in order for action to be taken. It's not really about what happened on Friday, it's about the implications that came with it. With the projected growth of IoT and if the hardware used continues to be unregulated we will eventually see a distributed attack on an unimaginable scale that WILL be very damaging. This is one of many major security threats that we are facing currently in the modern world.

For reference, I wasn't able to access any of the affected sites until around 5pm on the day of the attack, and I don't even live in a big city, though I do live on the east coast.

If you look at HN comments from posts about the attack while it was ongoing you can see plenty of people who were also affected by the attack (for example, people looking for name servers that cached longer than allowed, or opendns' smartcache). I understand why you think "the media" sensationalizes things, but in fact it is absolutely not complicit in saying things that are not true, even for the sake of embellishment (i.e. look at what happened to Brian Williams).

ddos attacks are script kiddy bullshit. I bet whatever kids behind it are absolutely loving the attention. Completely sensationalized stupidity to say our entire infrastructure could be "taken out" in such a way and wild speculation about it being a state sponsored attack. If a state wants to actually take out some infrastructure they have fucking bombs and missiles for that.

It is acceptable and logical for someone to not be directly or indirectly affected by an incident, yet it still is not bullshit.

Suppose Mars gets destroyed by an unseen cosmic event. Are Earthlings inciting bullshit to go "oh shit, this could happen to us?"

You sound like a certain presidential candidate. When things don't make sense to you, just blame the media.

It mattered for people on the East Coast. Where I am (New York), we couldn't access Github, Twitter, Paypal and many other services. To make matters worse, AWS us-east region was configured to use Dyn. Therefore, many applications that depended on it (and on Heroku) were down. At my workplace, we had to reconfigure DNS for our own applications even though we didn't directly use Dyn. It really was a big deal.

I'm sure a lot of people were unscathed by this event, but it appears to be more of a warm-up than the main event. I think it demonstrates the likelihood of further attacks and the possibility that those could have far-reaching consequences. You're right that the title is sensational, but I do believe the threat is daunting.

West-coaster here. Twitter unreacheable, Github unreacheable, Box unreacheable, Soundcloud unreacheable (I'm a musician, saw a friend's band's big song premiere go stale). Tons more. Just because you didn't feel it doesn't mean others didn't.

East coast here, it was a real big deal. Everything from streaming services to Okta/office365 logins were broken. All kinds of seemingly unrelated services were totally inaccessible for most of the work day, essentially draining productivity from the economy. Something bigger than this could shut down most of the economy considering most things use the Internet as a crucial infrastructure.

No. It mattered.

Did it? I only sort of noticed as well.

Yes. The attack vector and coordination is very concerning. Just because it didn't impact you doesn't mean it wasn't significant. It could have only been a feasibility test. Scaled up, this attack would be devastating.

It seems like it was a warning shot to show what they can do. Imagine the impact to the US if this had gone on for, what, days? Weeks? Is there any reason it couldn't continue indefinitely? It could be as devastating as a nuclear bomb detonation... One of the most profound effects would be the lack of trust everyone would now have for the services (etc) they rely on. The SaaS business model would become extinct overnight, and nothing important would be in the cloud. We'd all go back to desktop first applications, and all the enormous investment in cloud technology would be vaporized. If you don't trust the reliability of the internet, why would you rely on AWS and the like. You wouldn't.

But perhaps this is a smarter approach: build software and services in the most reliable way possible: offline enabled without the assumption of mostly available internet. Oh, and VOIP phone service? Gonzo. Where I work that was the worst effect of the outage. The phones simply didn't work... And we're basically a sales company. Not a lot of sales were made that day...