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T-Mobile, Fortnite, Instagram, Comcast, And Chase Bank Have All Experienced Outages. Some Believe The U.S. Has Been Hit By Large-Scale DDoS Attack—Others Are Skeptical

Forbes
Jesse Damiani
June 15, 2019



Sudden and wide-ranging outages in online and telecommunication services in the U.S. has led some to believe it is the result of a coordinated attack.

On June 15, a flurry of reports on a number of different services in the U.S. have indicated that the country may be experiencing a coordinated DDoS, or “distributed denial of service” attack. These attacks are malicious attempts to disrupt or shut down targeted servers by overwhelming them with traffic from multiple sources.

According to outage aggregator Downdetector, users reported outages in major mobile carriers (T-Mobile, Metro, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, Consumer Cellular, US Cellular), Internet providers (Spectrum, Comcast, CenturyLink, Cox), social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Twitter), games and game services (Fortnite, Roblox, Call of Duty, Steam, Xbox Live, Playstation Network), streaming services (Netflix, Hulu, HBO Now, Twitch), banks (Chase Bank, Bank of America), delivery services (Doordash), and other major platforms like Google and Zoom.

Of yet, the would-be source of these attacks is still unknown. @YourAnonCentral, a popular Anonymous twitter account, speculates that it, “may be China as the situation between South and North Korea is currently deteriorating.”

If you were wondering why your cell phone didn't work yesterday, read the rest of the article here.  The story is still developing.

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