A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on Moscow’s state-run telecommunications giant Rostelecom left millions of users in the lurch, causing disruptions to internet access, online banking, and government platforms across 30 major cities in Russia.
The “powerful" large-scale attack – still reportedly affecting some online services on Tuesday – began Monday evening Moscow time, according to Downdetector, with local media reporting the outages began about 9:00 p.m.
Rostelecom, which reported the attack to state-run news outlets, said it had “neutralized” the attack by 11:09 PM and that its data network had been operating normally since.
"On the evening of April 6, a powerful DDoS attack was detected on the Rostelecom network. Incoming traffic was filtered, which affected the availability of some internet resources. The cybercriminals' actions were quickly neutralized," the company told Tass Media.
Rostelecom, which boasts over 100 million subscribers across its mobile, broadband, and PayTV services, also provides digital services for thousands of Russian businesses, including data processing and cloud storage.
Besides home internet, many sites were reportedly inaccessible, including Microsoft Outlook, Discord, Telegram, Steam, CharacterAI, Gosuslugi, Wink, Rutube, League of Legends, World of Tanks, and more, according to users on Habr, a Russian IT social networking platform.
About 70% of users reported general failure issues, 11% said they experienced website crashes, and less than 10% reported problems accessing personal accounts and mobile apps that crashed.
Later on, after the Rostelecom-claimed fix, Tass reported a brief outage on the heavily regulated Russian-language internet service RuNet.
“Users in Russia reported a brief outage in the Russian internet segment, specifically affecting banks, internet services, and mobile operators, according to data from the service Sboy.RF as of 11:10 PM Moscow time,” TASS said.
User complaints were still being reported on Tuesday, according to Sboy.RF's "Failure Monitoring" Telegram channel.
Hundreds of users' complaints began to pour in about reported failures at several other major telecom companies, including MTS, Russia’s largest telecom operator, as well as Beeline, Megafon, and T2.
Other impacted sites reported include Russian Railways, online Russian retailer Wildberries, the Russian online classifieds Avito, and the popular social media networking sites VK Video and VKontakte, the outlet stated.
So far, no hacking group has claimed responsibility for the attacks.
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