White House spokesman Josh Earnest comments on the cyber attacks that caused a major internet disruption on several major websites Friday.

Wikileaks begs supporters to call off massive cyber attack on US: Supporters in bid to ‘take down internet in revenge for US government cutting Assange’s web links after Hillary email leaks’

Github, SoundCloud and PayPal also reported to be down

Some of Amazon’s cloud services also believed to have been hit

Outage appeared to be primarily affecting web users on the US East Coast

Second wave of attacks began around 1PM ET

Department of Homeland Security ‘investigating all potential causes’

The ongoing interruption of its network resulting from a DDoS attack

DDoS attacks are a primitive form of hacking using botnets – networks of computers that hackers bring under their control

A massive co-ordinated series of cyber attacks has forced hundreds of major websites from Amazon to Twitter offline across the globe – and WikiLeaks believes its supporters were responsible.

It urged its backers to ‘stop taking down the US internet’, saying ‘Mr Assange is still alive and WikiLeaks is still publishing’.

It then tweeted: ‘The Obama administration should not have attempted to misuse its instruments of state to stop criticism of its ruling party candidate.’

The Ecuadorian government switched off Assange’s internet service Sunday after he released another tranche of emails showing the contents of a speech given by Hillary Clinton to Goldman Sachs.

WikiLeaks accused John Kerry and the US Government of asking Ecuador to shut down Assange’s internet connection, but the South American country denied it came under any pressure from the US or any other government.

The Department of Homeland Security has already launched an urgent investigation into the crash, amid claims it could be a precursor to an attempt to disrupt the US Presidential election further.

Wikileaks has already come under fire for its decision to publish around 20,000 from John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chair.

Internet service company Dyn, which controls the ‘address book’ of the internet for dozens of major companies, said that it had suffered its first denial of service (DDoS) attack shortly after 6AM ET (11AM BST), in an attack that mostly affected the east coast of the US.

It told CNBC the attack is ‘well planned and executed, coming from tens of millions IP addresses at same time.’

It confirmed a second attack at 1PM ET, which appeared to be centred on UK servers, and later said ‘several’ attacks were underway on servers across the globe, with the west coast being particularly badly hit.

It was not immediately clear who was responsible and Gillian Christensen of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said the agency was ‘investigating all potential causes.’

Political commentor Keith Olbermann even raised the possibility it could be a precursor to an attack on election day.

‘Say, not to panic anybody, but what if the (attacks) today were practice for 11/8 ?’ he tweeted.

The cyber attack meant that millions of internet users could not access the websites of major online companies such as Netflix and Reddit as well as the crafts marketplace Etsy and the software developer site Github, according to media reports.

The website Gizmodo said it had received reports of difficulty at sites for media outlets including CNN, The Guardian, Wired, HBO and People as well as the money transfer service PayPal.

‘This has prevented some of our customers from being able to pay with PayPal in certain regions,’ said Paypal spokeswoman Amanda Miller.

‘PayPal was not attacked directly, nor were any of our core services to business impacted in the disruption.’

Amazon.com Inc’s web services division, one of the world’s biggest cloud computing companies, also disclosed an outage that lasted several hours on Friday morning.

Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Dyn, told Reuters he was not sure if the outages at Dyn and Amazon were connected.

‘We provide service to Amazon but theirs is a complex network so it is hard to be definitive about causality at the moment,’ he said.

Amazon could not immediately be reached for comment.

New Hampshire-based Dyn said its server infrastructure was hit by a distributed denial-of-service attack, which works by overwhelming targeted machines with malicious electronic traffic.

The level of disruption caused was hard to gauge, but Dyn provides internet traffic optimisation to some of the biggest names on the web.

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