Internet users in Wellington, Christchurch and Auckland suddenly lost their internet this afternoon due to an outage on the Vocus network.

Vocus, which owns Orcon, Slingshot and Flip, has stated that the disruption is linked to a DDoS attack. And large corporate companies like Kiwibank, have been affected as well.

Vocus released a statement saying: “This afternoon a Vocus customer was under DDoS attack. We, through the Arbor DDoS platform, blocked the attack for the end customer. Based on initial investigations it was this action that disrupted service to a range of Vocus customers, including Slingshot and Orcon, for around 30 minutes. We are working closely with the vendor of this platform to understand why this occurred.” 

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack takes advantage of the limited capacity limits that apply to any network resources.

An attack like this will send multiple requests to the resource trying to exceed its capacity to handle requests. This will prevent the network from functioning correctly.

If Vocus’ claims that a DDoS attack is the cause of the internet outage, then the network will have received more requests than it can handle and the internet has been affected.

In some cases, a DDoS attacker is trying to prevent the network from functioning normally and in other DDoS attacks, the attacker has requested a payment to stop the denial of service.