Everyone is connected to the Internet. Whether it’s surfing the web, connecting with customers through SalesForce, streaming Netflix or instant shopping on Etsy, we all rely on it for daily communication. But what keeps it all running smoothly? Meet Dyn – the Manchester, NH-based superpower behind the Internet.

PAN has been working with Dyn for the past year and it’s been a whirlwind of a year for the company and team since! As this month’s client spotlight, we thought we’d take a look at some of the highlights.

Foundation Set the Stage for a Successful Funding Announcement 

With the company’s increased visibility, Dyn continued the momentum with the news of a significant funding. When the latest funding announcement came out – a $50M Series B –  Dyn focused key messages and highlighted the company’s strategic funding history. Executives spoke to some of the most notable press in New England, as well as the national tech and business press.

While people knew of Dyn, the Internet Performance Management (IPM) market was a new category for the industry. This presented a unique opportunity for the company to educate the tech audience about IPM. In positioning the company as a leader in the space, Dyn wrote multiple contributed bylines to raise visibility in key technology and business publications including eWEEK, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Light Reading and Entrepreneur.

Overcoming a PR Crisis

On October 21, 2016, Dyn was targeted by one of the most complex and sophisticated Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against its managed DNS infrastructure. While the attack resulted in top sites such as Twitter, Airbnb and Netflix experiencing service interruptions, Dyn was able to successfully mitigate the attack to limit further disruptions. From a communications perspective, Dyn maintained a proactive approach to keeping its customers and the internet up-to-date on service status and the attack using its dynstatus.com site, blog and media channels to both provide near real-time updates and broader context and analysis of the event. Dyn executives were available and transparent with media on the day of the attack and in the weeks after, earning it the good will of the public, the Internet community, and, most importantly, its customers.

In the afternoon of the attacks, Dyn hosted not one, but two press conferences inviting key members of the business media to get the latest updates from Chief Strategy Officer, Kyle York. The attendees including reporters from The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, The New York Times, NPR, AP, NBC Nightly News, WIRED, USA Today, and many more. In 10 days, there were more than 800 articles and 9,000+ online mentions of Dyn, not including social media. The Today Show featured a positive segment on the attack featuring Dyn GM & Chief Strategy Officer, Kyle York, who shed light on the event and educated the public on the reality of IoT and security issues. According to experts quoted in Ben DePietro’s “Crisis of the Week” article in The Wall Street Journal’s Risk & Compliance Journal, Dyn’s crisis communications performance around the event was spot on.

“We engaged with PAN as we started to shift our messaging and reach a new enterprise audience. PAN provided opportunities to extend our thought leadership and highlight our executives to top business press. They were instrumental in setting the strategy for our recent investment news and proved to be a steady hand during an exciting time. The results stand for themselves.”- Adam Coughlin, Director, Corporate Communications

Acquisition by Oracle

Exactly one month after the DDoS attack, Dyn was acquired by Oracle on November 21, 2016. Oracle acquired Dyn because of the company’s immensely scalable and global DNS, a critical component to the success of the brand. This acquisition was a natural fit as they continue to develop their cloud computing platform. From this acquisition, Oracle will now be able to provide their customers with unique access to internet performance information that will help with optimization and risk management.