Twitter and Spotify among raft of websites hit by cyber attack

Several of the internet's most popular websites were unavailable for an extended period on Friday after a suspected cyber attack took place, disabling web technology provider Dyn.

Twitter, Spotify, Tumblr and SoundCloud were among those affected by the outage, which came as a result of a "distributed denial-of-service", according to Dyn.

The internet management firm said that the issue was resolved at around 9:20am ET.

DDoS is a common ploy used by hackers to take down internet servers, in which they utilise a large network of computers to overload sites with junk traffic.

Amazon has previously said it has been affected by such attacks on the East Coast of the United States.

In a tweet posted Friday, Spotify said it was "having some issues right now and investigating," while SoundCloud said it was "investigating the cause".