Services at telecommunications operator MTN’s Gallo Manor data centre in Johannesburg were negatively affected on Tuesday following a cyber attack.
MTN says the data centre was hit by a series of distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks on Tuesday. A DDOS attack typically involves a number of compromised IT systems overflooding a server with requests in a bid to cause a “denial of service”.
The attacks on the MTN data centre subsequently resulted in disruptions in connectivity services owing to what MTN says was “packet loss on some of its nodes that service the Gallo Manor data centre”.
MTN has not revealed what the source of the DDoS attack was, but the company says the situation is under control.
“We have now rapidly implemented mitigation measures and connectivity is fully restored. MTN has also installed new hardware and software to provide protection from future DDOS attacks,” said MTN in a statement on Wednesday.
The mobile network also apologised to customers in its statement.
Meanwhile, MTN has further said it experienced a separate interruption to services on Tuesday owing to a power outage that happened on Monday. — Fin24