WELLINGTON (Reuters) – An internet provider in New Zealand suffered an outage on Friday that media said was caused by a hacking attack, disrupting services though many users later said the problem had been resolved.
The outage at the Vocus New Zealand service provider was related to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, the New Zealand Herald reported, quoting a company spokesperson.
“Mitigation has been in place to reduce the impact … we will continue to monitor the services and provide updates,” the spokesperson told the Herald.
There was no immediate response from the company to calls and emails from Reuters seeking comment.
A DDoS attack is a way in which hackers disrupt a server by overwhelming it with a flood of internet traffic.
The loss of the internet hit users in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch in the early afternoon, the New Zealand Herald reported. Some users reported online connections had resumed after about 90 minutes, it said.
New Zealand internet company Orcon, which is owned by Vocus, said on Twitter that it had experienced network issues but they had been resolved.
Kiwibank said on Twitter that broad network issues had impacted businesses but they were later back up and running.
(Reporting by Praveen Menon; Editing by Jacqueline Wong, Robert Birsel)
