On Monday, it was widely reported that a number of services in the U.S. were experiencing outages that some suspected could have been the result of a DDoS attack, short for a distributed denial-of-service attack. A DDoS attack attempts to take down servers by flooding them with traffic.
People began noticing that they were unable to make phone calls or send text messages and took to social media to express their frustrations. Shortly after, it appeared that there were outages across multiple carriers, social media platforms, and cable providers.
T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon, Fortnite, Facebook, Instagram, Comcast, and Chase Bank were some of the services that reported outages.
The fans were flamed on the DDoS outage when an account associated with Anonymous, @YourAnonCentral, posted on Twitter that it was an attack from China since things were not well between North and South Korea.
“The source of the DDoS attack on the United States is currently unknown. We speculate it may be China as the situation between South and North Korea is currently deteriorating,” the Anonymous tweet read.
However, the actual reason was much less dramatic than the rumors swirling around. It was actually not a DDoS attack from China, but an issue with T-Mobile’s network.
T-Mobile’s CEO Mike Sievert issued a statement to T-Mobile’s website on Monday night, acknowledging the outages and that they were being worked on.
“T-Mobile has been experiencing a voice and text issue that has intermittently impacted customers in markets across the U.S.,” the statement said. “This is an IP traffic-related issue that has created significant capacity issues in the network core throughout the day.”
Sievert went on to say that hundreds of their engineers and vendor partner staff were working on the issue and would continue to do so. Services were fully restored as of early Tuesday morning.
The reason why Instagram, Facebook, Chase Bank, and other services were reportedly down was because of T-Mobile users not being able to access them, so it wasn’t that they were down but that a specific subset of users could not access them and it spread across social media like wildfire.
