10/4 - Today's disruption of Social Media had seismic repercussions around the internet. The DNS issues that are currently crippling Facebook, Instagram, and What's App; caused issues across other platforms as well. DNS resolving services were inundated with requests to connect to the Facebook/Instagram/What's App domains causing interruptions in services for a short time. There is no word yet on when the Facebook company services will be restored - but if you are interested - here is more information on what happened.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/technology/facebook-whatsapp-and-instagram-down-due-to-dns-outage/

#socialmedia #instagram #facebook #dns

10/4 - According to multiple sources - not only are Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are down. @downdetector shows many more sites are impacted. We will share more once we know more. 

9/29 - Over the weekend one of the largest US underlying carriers (ULC) network was impacted by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) cyberattack causing a disruption in services. This attack is similar to the attack on Canadian carrier VoIP.MS that started on September 16th and two UK providers earlier in the month. The US-based ULC service is not down, but the flood of malicious traffic is blocking legitimate traffic into their network. Your VOIP Provider uses this ULC as the carrier of record from many of your telephone numbers. This is a unique situation; our industry has not experienced a successful attack of this size on a carrier in the US ever.

How does this attack impact our VOIP customers?
The DDoS attack disrupted calls going to telephone numbers where this ULC is the carrier of record. Customers may experience intermittent failure on calls to their telephone numbers, including calls with impaired audio quality. In some cases, touch tones/DTMF signals are also not being sent. If the call connects the caller may not be able to press 0 for the operator. Outbound services remain fully functional unless you are calling a telephone number provided by the same ULC. Toll-free numbers are different from your standard direct dial numbers.

What can your VOIP Provider do to direct traffic around the attack?
Most VOIPS have relationships with multiple ULCs, however, inbound DIDs can only be connected to a single provider of record. When you started your service with your VOIP provider you ported your numbers from your old carrier to your VOIP provider. In many cases, they selected this ULC as the carrier of record and cannot choose to receive the inbound traffic to an alternative network. At this time all VOIP Providers are looking for alternate means to route calls.

What is the impact of this DDoS attack?
DDoS against any ULC will affect large and small customers alike. Based on the news we believe that providers such as Microsoft Teams, Google Voice, Ring Central, and many more are experiencing the same service disruption. The VOIP providers we partner with are in communication with the ULC, as their upstream carrier, but at the time of this email, an estimated time of resolution is unknown. While we have seen significant improvement as the ULC improves its routing to block the DDOS attack, services may remain intermittent until the attack can be completely mitigated.  We will provide more updates as they become available.

9/28/21 - We've been provided preliminary data indicating the DDoS attack responsible for the previous day's issues has likely returned to the upstream provider's infrastructure. Their status portal also confirms partial outages across their services.

We will continue to monitor the situation.

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