Dyn was created as a community-led student project by Tim Wilde during his undergraduate studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

[2][3] Eventually, Wilde, the founder, brought in Jeremy Hitchcock and Tom Daly as partners.

Dyn enabled students to access lab computers and print documents remotely.

[5] Later, a premium service called the DynECT Managed DNS Platform became available in 2008,[6] with the hiring of Kyle York, Gray Chynoweth and Cory von Wallenstein, as the business began to scale.

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).