Sites from Netflix, Spotify, and Reddit to The New York Times and, yes, even WIRED went dark.

The massive outage was the result of an attack on an Internet infrastructure company called Dyn. You'd think that finding yourself at the center of such a destructive online maelstrom wouldn't be much of a sales pitch. But it seems to have worked out for Dyn: today database giant Oracle said it plans to acquire the company.

Dyn is best known for providing domain name system (DNS) services–essentially address books for the internet that help websites tell the world how to get from an address like "wired.com" to the web servers that host the pages. Oracle, meanwhile, is best known for selling business software to large companies.