Customers of leading fibre-to-the-home broadband provider Cool Ideas have been suffering from intermittent and sometimes non-existent Internet access since Tuesday night.

Services had still not been restored by mid-afternoon on Wednesday, with the call centre unavailable to take calls.

The Internet service provider has used its social media accounts to blame the outage on a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

It did not say whether it knew what the source of the attack was, who might be behind it or when services might be restored.

DDoS attacks typically involve a perpetrator using multiple systems to flood a target’s computers and other resources with junk network traffic to overload them, crippling services in the process.

Customers trying to call Cool Ideas on Wednesday afternoon were greeted with the following pre-recorded message: “Please note there is an issue affecting all customers on the Cool Ideas network. Customers will experience intermittent connectivity and degraded performance during this time. As a result, our office telephones are also out of order currently.”

The company could not immediately be reached for comment.

‘Long night ahead’

Update: Cool Ideas said on Twitter on Wednesday evening that it had “managed to mitigate the network issue experienced today”. However, it said its technical staff still had a “long night ahead of monitoring and resolving issues” ahead. “Your link should be restored. Please be sure to reboot and apologies for the frustration experienced.” — (c) 2019 NewsCentral Media