Was there really a DDoS Attack?

There was growing concerns about a ramping and real-time DDoS attack against U.S. infrastructure on Monday afternoon. The said event started at 12pm EST and continued on towards the evening hours. Multiple sources led the industry to infer it was due to a DDoS attack.

The initial spark of a social media account claiming association with the hacktivist group Anonymous shared a link to a digital attack map illustrating evidence. Though the source of the data was represented through an attack map, there still needs to be validation of how much data is actual vs vendor inferred content.

The rumors sparked enough interested via re-tweets that the growing concern needed validation amongst social media commotion. Thru reports of down service it was clear multiple service providers experienced the impact with T-Mobile service suffering from the confirmed outage. Neville Ray, T-Mobiles president of technology tweeted

"Teams continue to work as quickly as possible to fix the voice & messaging problems some are seeing. Data services are now available & some calls are completing. Alternate services like WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage, Facetime etc. are available. Thanks for your patience."

Further confirmation that the effects were due to a service outage began to surface on mailing lists used to communicate such service impacts.

T-Mobile later confirms that the outage has been resolved and many reports indicating the event was not incurred due to a DDoS attack.

With our world connected more than ever, we clearly recognize our dependency on technology and the dependency of ensuring the security and vulnerabilities associated with the technologies are understood and reduced. The event does not go without further scrutiny as to whether such outages should be considered acceptable. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai refers to the outage as "unacceptable" and plans to launch an investigation.