Due to sudden and wide-ranging outages with online and telecommunication services in the US, many now believe that this is a co-ordinated DDoS attack.
What is a DDoS Attack?
A Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS attack) is where multiple systems flood a particular service or server with requests. As the server/service is flooded, it can’t serve people who have genuine requests and is therefore compromised.
Users in the US reported outages from many mobile carriers, internet providers, social media platforms, gaming services, streaming services, banks and major platforms like Google and Zoom.
The mobile carriers were T-Mobile, Metro, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, Consumer Cellular and US Cellular. Internet providers included Spectrum, Comcast, CenturyLink and Cox. Major social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and Twitter. The games/gaming services affected were Fortnite, Roblox, Call of Duty, Steam, Xbox Live and Playstation Network. Streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, HBO Now and Twitch.
The source of the attack as of now is still unknown. A popular anonymous Twitter account (@YourAnonCentral) had speculated that China could have been the source of the attack due to the “situation between South and North Korea is currently deteriorating.”
Hours after the beginning of the “attack”, T-Mobile was still trying to resolve the issue. Verizon, on the other hand, has claimed that their issues were only artificially being represented through the attempts to connect to T-Mobile.
A spokesperson from Verizon had said that their network is “preforming well” and that they’re aware another network is having issues. “Calls to and from that carrier (T-Mobile) may receive an error message.”
After 12 hours of a network outage, T-Mobile had managed to resolve their issue.
One Particular Twitter User Debunking the DDoS Claims
Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, had debunked the DDoS claims on Twitter. He tweeted several graphs showing that there isn’t evidence of a DDoS attack. One of the Tweets – accompanied by a graph, had shown that there was no spike in traffic to any major Internet Exchanges. You would usually see a spike in traffic during a DDoS attack. You “definitely would during one allegedly this disruptive”.
However, whilst this does make sense, it doesn’t explain how so many platforms had trouble working so suddenly. What do you think about the situation?
