Tag Archive for: outages

FBI, Department of Homeland Security investigating AT&T outages

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Several agencies, including the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, are investigating whether the widespread AT&T outages are the result of a cyberattack or hack.

Reports of disruptions started flooding in early Thursday morning around 4 a.m., with some 30,000 AT&T customers complaining of technical difficulties, leaving them unable to place calls, text or access the internet. Within hours, the number of people suffering issues more than doubled, and by 9:30 a.m., some 74,000 people reported having network connection issues, according to downdetector.com, a website that provides real-time information about the status of online services.

AT&T, the nation’s largest service carrier, acknowledged the outages in a statement shortly thereafter, saying 75% of its network had been restored. According to downdetector.com, some 15,000 users still had issues as of 1 p.m.

So far, no reason has been given for the service problems, but the White House said multiple federal agencies have communicated with AT&T about the outages, Reuters reported. National Security spokesman John Kirby confirmed Thursday that both the FBI and the DHS are looking into the matter in addition to working with partners in the tech industry to “see what we can do from a federal perspective to lend a hand to their investigative efforts to figure out what happened here.”

Kirby added that while they “don’t have all the answers” yet, the investigative efforts are ongoing.

“I mean, this just happened earlier today. And so we’re working very hard to see if we can get to the ground truth of exactly what happened,” he said.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — an agency under the DHS umbrella, which is tasked with monitoring cyber threats — echoed Kirby’s statement in a confidential memo obtained by ABC News. It said “the cause of the outage is unknown, and there are no indications of malicious activity.”

The Federal Communications Commission is also investigating the outages.

With News Wire Services

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Feds: Ransomware attack causing outages at 60 U.S. credit unions

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The National Credit Union Administration says some 60 locations across the country are experiencing system outages due to a ransomware hack.

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NZ websites down – Security update causes widespread internet outages

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Banks and other local websites and apps have been inaccessible for some users this morning. Photo / File

An internet glitch rendered banking apps and a number of .co.nz websites inaccessible for some users this morning.

It appears to be related to an attempt by InternetNZ – the non-profit that administers local web domains – to rollout a better system for protecting users from fake versions of websites.

“Our apologies, we’re aware that certain Internet Service providers are encountering issues this morning. This means some of our customers will have issues accessing FastNet Classic and ASB mobile,” ASB posted this morning on its Facebook page.

And after Sheri Ngaha complained on Kiwibank’s Facebook page “Why can’t we get into the app or ring this morning. This is so annoying, I’m needing to transfer money but can’t,” the bank replied: “We’re currently experiencing an issue for some customers when trying to access our App or Internet Banking. Our teams are looking into this at the moment and we hope to have this resolved soon.”

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On Twitter, Hamish Mack posted: “NZ sites RNZ, New World shopping online and Kiwibank sites are not working? What the heck??”

And Rebecca McMillan said the outage did not seem to have affected Govt.nz but all NZ apps and websites she used were down.

“Can’t even listen to @radionz because the mobile app is down. Yikes. Time to get a transistor radio.”

A service bulletin from InternetNZ late yesterday noted technical problems that hit .ac.nz (education) addresses yesterday then spread to other local domains from 10.45pm last night. InternetNZ today said all times of local internet addresses were affected. An update at 9.21am this morning said, “The issue will resolve over time”.

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Responding to a Herald query on Twitter, cloud computing engineer Simon Lyall said, “InternetNZ was changing the key they use to sign .nz and made a mistake. So DNS [domain name server] queries are getting a certificate error.” In other words, it seems a change designed to boost security went haywire, rendering some sites inaccessible. It seems the change related to a measure to prevent…

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Observations on Resolver Behavior During DNS Outages

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When an outage affects a component of the internet infrastructure, there can often be downstream ripple effects affecting other components or services, either directly or indirectly. We would like to share our observations of this impact in the case of two recent such outages, measured at various levels of the DNS hierarchy, and discuss the resultant increase in query volume due to the behavior of recursive resolvers.

During the beginning of October 2021, the internet saw two significant outages, affecting Facebook’s services and the .club top level domain, both of which did not properly resolve for a period of time. Throughout these outages, Verisign and other DNS operators reported significant increases in query volume. We provided consistent responses throughout, with the correct delegation data pointing to the correct nameservers.

While these higher query rates do not impact Verisign’s ability to respond, they raise a broader operational question—whether the repeated nature of these queries, indicative of a lack of negative caching, might potentially be mistaken for a denial-of-service attack.

Facebook

On Oct. 4, 2021, Facebook experienced a widespread outage, lasting nearly six hours. During this time most of its systems were unreachable, including those that provide Facebook’s DNS service. The outage impacted facebook.com, instagram.com, whatsapp.net and other domain names.

Under normal conditions, the .com and .net authoritative name servers answer about 7,000 queries per second in total for the three domain names previously mentioned. During this particular outage, however, query rates for these domain names reached upwards of 900,000 queries per second (an increase of more than 100x), as shown in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1: Rate of DNS queries for Facebook’s domain names during the 10/4/21 outage.

During this outage, recursive name servers received no response from Facebook’s name servers—instead, those queries timed out. In situations such as this, recursive name servers generally return a SERVFAIL or “server failure” response, presented to end users as a “this site can’t be reached” error.

Figure 1 shows an increasing query…

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