Thousands of Australians are left without internet as Telstra suffers a major outage after hackers carry out a ‘malicious’ cyber attack
- Thousands of Telstra customers across Australia’s east coast have no internet
- Telstra said hackers were carrying out a ‘malicious’ cyber on its servers
- The telco insisted customers’ information wasn’t at risk as a result of attack
Hackers are carrying out a ‘malicious’ cyber attack on Telstra, creating connectivity issues for thousands of home internet users across Australia.
Telstra reported the denial of service attack on its servers on Sunday which has led to widespread internet outages in Australia’s eastern states.
A denial of service attack floods a network with traffic or information to trigger a crash, denying legitimate users access.
The telecommunications giant said it was confident it had now blocked all ‘malicious traffic’ and is continuing to work on getting users back online.
‘Your info isn’t at risk,’ Telstra tweeted.
Telstra’s outage website, which is used to inform customers of downtime, also crashed on Sunday.
‘You know someone’s having a bad day when the outages website is having an outage,’ one man tweeted.
Customers first reported their internet was down just before 9am.
Melbourne suburbs of Brunswick, Essendon and Glen Iris are worst hit by the outage, according to real-time outage website Down Detector.
In Sydney, customers in the inner-city and western suburbs are most impacted.
Furious customers took to Twitter to slam Australia’s largest internet for the crash.
‘Being in lockdown on a Sunday with Telstra internet not working is peak 2020 despair,’ tweeted one Melburnian.
‘My internet has paralysed the last 2 hours, arguably to a massive DNS attach on Telstra,’ tweeted another unhappy customer.
Another Telstra customer said the outage was a good chance to get his kids off Fortnite and out playing in the garden.
‘Telstra are thinking about our quality of life, by switching off the Internet, all their customers get to go outside, enjoy this glorious winter morning with a coffee and a good book, kids playing in the garden. How is that for customer focus,’ he tweeted.