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. 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) • 2011: Dyn opened an office in
London, and eventually moved its EMEA headquarters to
Brighton. In the same year, Dyn opened new headquarters in
Manchester, New Hampshire, United States. • October 2012: Dyn completed a
Series A round of
venture capital funding totaling
US$38 million from
North Bridge Venture Partners. Prior to the investment from North Bridge, the company had been self-funded. • August 2013: Dyn launched its annual geek summer camp event, a
business conference for the Internet performance industry. • April 2014: Dyn announced the discontinuation of its free
hostname services effective May 7. • September 2014: Dyn Internet Intelligence, a
SaaS-based product, was launched.
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 hosts file).
Acquisition by Oracle • May 2016: Dyn obtained further equity funding of $50 million from Pamplona Capital Management; total funding was $100 million. The company had scaled to approximately $100 million in annual recurring revenue prior to its acquisition by Oracle. Dyn launched its platform for Internet performance management. • November 21, 2016: Dyn announced that it had agreed to be acquired by
Oracle Corporation. • June 2018: Oracle released the Internet Intelligence Map, a free tool that provides data about worldwide
Internet traffic and
disruptions. The map uses the Internet Intelligence technology Oracle acquired from Dyn. • June 2019: Oracle announced Dyn's Managed and Standard DNS services would be shutting down in May 2020; this date was later extended to May 31, 2023. • The email sent to Standard DNS customers informed them that the Standard DNS service would be replaced by the "enhanced, paid subscription version" hosted on
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Several customers publicly shared that they would not be migrating to OCI. In addition, a large number of Dyn's Manchester, New Hampshire employees were laid off, and the office space was put up for rent by the building owner. Many people were upset about this, including early Dyn adopters who were receiving "free for life" Standard DNS service, which was no longer being honored as of the transition to OCI DNS. "We truly appreciate your support throughout the years. While we are discontinuing the availability of services received at no cost, you may be surprised by how affordable the DNS service is within OCI along with outstanding capabilities with this service." == Dyn acquisitions ==