T-Mobile Issue That Sparked The 'Massive DDoS Attack' Targeting The U.S. Speculation

Users from T-Mobile, Sprint, AT&T to Verizon, were said to have their connections disrupted across the U.S.. As a result, those people were said to have experienced a series of internet, phone, and data outages.

In other words, millions of people were said to be hit with the outages.

It began when T-Mobile was hit hard, with both its voice and data services affected, as massive spikes in outage reports on Down Detector starting at 1PM ET.

Neville Ray, T-Mobile president of technology, tweeted that the company was aware of the issue and that T-Mobile engineers were work hard to fix it, saying that its "engineers are working to resolve a voice and data issue that has been affecting customers around the country. We're sorry for the inconvenience and hope to have this fixed shortly."

A Verizon spokesperson however, said that "Downdetector is falsely reporting Verizon network issues." The company however, was "aware that another carrier is having network issues".

"A lot of factors can contribute to a false report on a third-party website... a faulty device, network traffic that slows but doesn't inhibit connections, commercial RF blockers, human error, network issues impacting other carriers and more".

Not just mobile providers were disrupted, as YouTube, Fortnite, Twitch and some others were also said to be affected all at the same time. Social media platforms themselves, online services and even banking were reported to down like dominoes.

The hacker group 'Anonymous' laid the blame on China, and suggested that a major cyber-attack was underway.

This made the term Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS) started trending on Twitter, and anyone experiencing any connectivity issue was seeing the moment as a major cyberattack. It didn't take long until news outlets and the press suggest that the U.S. was experiencing one of the biggest cyberattacks in its history.

But others speculated otherwise.

Matthew Prince, the CEO at DDoS protection specialist Cloudflare, for example.

Cloudflare that powers internet requests for ~13% of the Fortune 1,000 for more than 1 billion unique IP addresses per day, Prince said that his company found absolutely no actual evidence that a significant DDoS attack was underway.

There was "no spike in traffic to any of the major internet exchanges," he said. What's more, the traffic to the services that were being reported as disrupted was showing as perfectly normal.

Prince tried to explain that the disruption wasn't at all the biggest cyberattack in history, but was rather a case of retweeted complaints going viral.

He said that the issue began while T-Mobile was making configurations to its network, which inadvertently led to “a series of cascading failures for their users, impacting both their voice and data networks.”

This made T-Mobiles users, Price continued, to begin complaining on social media about being unable to reach a range of popular services. This happened not necessarily because those services were actually affected, but because their mobile phone network was failing.

Websites like DownDetector.com is designed to let users know whether certain services are experiencing issues, to then collect those complaints.

What this means, users accessing the site can be given the false impression that a service is down based mostly on word-of-mouth.

And pair that with the moments following George Floyd's death, civil unrest and others, the tension brought people to speculate things to be worse that they actually were.

Jake Moore, a cybersecurity specialist at ESET, said that, rumors can "spread like wildfire on the internet, and it's usually horror sounding stories like this that travel the fastest."

"Fact-checking before sharing is vital, but as it takes time, many people tend to just read a headline before sharing it, which adds fuel to the fire."

And Anonymous here was said to be one who added the most fuel to the fire. Considering that it has more than 6.5 million followers on Twitter and has been behind many disruptions on the web, despite had in many times created false claims, the group is an influential entity on its own.

What this means, whatever it says is to be taken seriously by many people.