Massive Cyberattacks Dramatically Hurt Revenues for All Kinds of Internet Players

Heather Daniels owns a small business, Lyon's Prints, that she has run primarily on Etsy since 2014. Etsy was among the websites that fell victim to three waves of cyberattacks that lasted hours and rocked the web on Friday, also affecting Twitter, Pinterest, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Reddit, Spotify and many others.

Underscoring how all kinds of players were negatively impacted, Daniels said she only received two orders on Friday, when she normally gets around 35.

"The only reason that I was able to receive those [two] orders was because they came from Canada … and they were not affected by that internet provider," Daniels said.

The outages were caused by a distributed denial-of-service—or DDoS—attack on web-domain provider Dyn. It all started in the morning, when a slew of digital publishers and other ecommerce players were hit by the cyberattack, causing their sites in some parts of the U.S.—chiefly on the East Coast and in Southern California—to go out, a problem that lingered into the late afternoon.

"I am self-employed, so losing an entire day of pay is financially devastating for me," Daniels said. "One of my customers ordered something that she needed to have printed [on Friday] for a party [on Saturday], and I was not able to get it to her."

A handful of marketers' comments below Adweek's posting of its cyberattacks story on Facebook tell a tale of ecommerce players losing sales, business-to-business players not getting leads, research surveys being completely stalled and email campaigns going dark.

One commenter wrote that her email service provider was part of the outage: "Constant Contact has been down! I'm about ready to permanently switch to Mail Chimp … but that's been on my mind for a while."

Adweek also contacted a few midsize marketers who expressed troubles on Facebook, but each of them declined to elaborate further. Indeed, it's not exactly good PR to publicly admit your employer's business has been damaged.

But it seems fairly clear the damage was widespread.