Security News
The second-largest telecommunications provider in South Korea, KT Corporation, has suffered a nationwide outage today, leaving all its 16.5 million customers without internet connectivity and telephony services for about 40 minutes. While the scenario of a DDoS attack was communicated as the most likely cause of the problem initially, the firm later explained that it was a routing error that took its services down.
The UK's largest retailer, supermarket titan Tesco, has restored its online operations after an attack hack left its customers unable to order, amend, or cancel deliveries for two days. A Tesco statement acknowledges disruption to the giant's grocery website and app, claiming "An attempt was made to interfere with our systems, which has caused problems with the search function on the site."
The University of Sunderland in the UK has announced extensive operational issues that have taken most of its IT systems down, attributing the problem to a cyber-attack. University updateThe University continues to experience extensive IT issues which has all the hallmarks of a cyber-attack.
This comes after competitors like Signal and Telegram shared info on a massive exodus of Facebook users joining or switching to other platforms following the 6-hour-long downtime that impacted Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Signal and Telegram also began experiencing in the wake of Facebook's global outage after millions of Facebook users were joining their platforms.
Matrix-based communications and collaboration app Element has continued its mission to make bridges into the decentralised network a little more commercially acceptable with connectivity for Signal. Amandine Le Pape, co-founder of Element, had already given WhatsApp a jab with the privacy blade the last time we spoke and Element's CEO, Matthew Hodgson, joined the party during our chat about the Signal bridge.
As of Monday night, Facebook had crawled back from what may have been its longest blackout ever and apologized for the mass outage that left billions of users locked out of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Oculus VR for about six hours. When it comes to gauging Facebook's worst blackout ever, accounts vary: CNBC reported that Monday's outage was the longest downtime that Facebook has experienced since 2008, when a bug knocked its site offline for about a day, affecting some 80 million users.
Facebook says that yesterday's worldwide outage was caused by faulty configuration changes made to its backbone routers that brought all its services to a halt. "Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication," said Santosh Janardhan, VP for Engineering and Infrastructure at Facebook.
As of Monday afternoon, Facebook had been flat on its face for hours, suffering a simultaneous worldwide outage not only on its main site, but also at its Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Oculus VR subsidiaries. The New York Times reported that Facebook's internal communications platform, Workplace, was also dragged offline, "Leaving most employees unable to do their jobs." It's been a thumb-twiddling afternoon, the Times reported, with two Facebook employees comparing it to a "Snow day."
Users worldwide are reporting that they are unable to access Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, instead seeing errors that the sites can't be reached. When attempting to open any of the three sites, they are given DNS PROBE FINISHED NXDOMAIN errors and advised to check if there is a typo in the domain entered in the address bar.
Twitter is experiencing a worldwide outage affecting their web platform that prompts users to logout and prevents them from accessing tweets. The outage began at around noon EST and only affects the web/desktop version of Twitter, not the mobile platform.