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Is your internet slow today? Thank the DDoS attack that hit SA ISPs
Update, Mon 28 Oct, 8.30pm: ISPs continue to struggle after Sunday evening’s DDoS attack.
Axxess updated users at 3pm stating that its “upstream provider engineers have alleviated the current intermittent connectivity.”
WebAfrica had a lack of tweets regarding its issues, but did update its network status page.
“We were experiencing a network speed issue affecting our customer connection performance. The moment we had any confirmed feedback with regards to the DDoS issue- we immediately updated our network status page to make sure all are as informed as we are on the updates received,” the company tweeted early on Monday.
Afrihost had no further updates as of 8pm.
Original article: A number of South African internet service providers (ISPs) are limping away from a widespread distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on Sunday.
According to a MyBroadband report, ISPs Afrihost, Axxess, and WebAfrica are all currently affected.
We are aware that some clients are experiencing poor performance on their internet services. Our engineers are investigating and hope to restore normal performance ASAP. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause https://t.co/EvW0086SsF
— Afrihost (@Afrihost) October 27, 2019
ADSL & FIBRE Network Notices. pic.twitter.com/RMyI5174Lk
— AXXESS (@AxxessDSL) October 27, 2019
As of Monday morning, both Afrihost and Axxess are still struggling with intermittent connectivity and poor network performance.
WebAfrica failed to provide an update.
It’s not yet clear when their services will be restored.
DDoS attacks in a nutshell
A DDoS attack inundates the target server with too many requests, slowing it down to a crawl and in some cases bringing it to a complete halt.
More famous attacks in the past include 2016’s DynDNS attack, which left a vast swathe of the internet inaccessible.
In the same year, the SABC was also a victim of an attack.
Reddit, the PlayStation Network and the now defunct Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange have all suffered similar attacks in the past.
The DDoS on these ISPs comes just days after Sabric (the SA Banking Risk Info Centre) announced that South Africa’s banks were hit by DDoS attacks of their own.
Feature image: Andy Walker/Memeburn
