Dyn, Inc. was an Internet performance management company that also dealt with web application security, offering products to monitor, control, and optimize online infrastructure, and also domain registration services and email products. The company was acquired by Oracle Corporation in 2016. It began operating as a global business unit of Oracle in 2017.

History

Dyn was created as a community-led student project by Tim Wilde during his undergraduate studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Eventually, Wilde, the founder, brought in Jeremy Hitchcock and Tom Daly as partners. Dyn enabled students to access lab computers and print documents remotely. The project then moved toward Domain Name System (DNS) services. The first iteration was a free donation-based dynamic DNS service known as DynDNS. The project required $25,000 to stay open and raised over $40,000. The donation-based model continued until 2002 and ended with a launch of "donator-only" DNS services. Later, a premium service called the DynECT Managed DNS Platform became available in 2008, with the hiring of Kyle York, Gray Chynoweth and Cory von Wallenstein, as the business began to scale.

Pre-acquisition (2011–2015)

2016 attack

On October 21, 2016, Dyn's networks were attacked three times with a distributed denial-of-service attack, causing major sites including Twitter, Reddit, GitHub, Amazon.com, Netflix, Spotify, RuneScape, Quora, and Dyn's own website to become unreachable via the URL (although most sites may have been available via IP address manually or through a maintained file).

Acquisition by Oracle

Dyn acquisitions