Entire Country is Left Without Internet After DDoS Attack

The internet is far from being a friendly and safe place, regardless of how much we would like to believe otherwise. A new event proves it once again, just in case you needed it.

According to Tom’s Hardware, a Twitch gaming tournament in Minecraft known as SquidCraft Games was enough for repeated distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to do their dirty work over the only ISP from Andorra, which is known as Andorra Telecom.

No more internet in the entire country of Andorra

The attack led to an internet shutdown or barely functioning in the entire country of Andorra for about half an hour.

As translated via Microsoft Edge into English, the tweet wrote:

‎We inform you that the internet network is suffering a denial of service (DDoS) attack. For this reason, some users may have difficulty browsing the internet. We’re mitigating that.‎

Surely you’re wondering what the purpose of the attack in the first place was. Just for fun? That’s highly unlikely. One hypothesis is that Andorra Telecom was targeted by the DDoS attack because of the large prize that was offered in the tournament.

Being a player from Andorra and a participant in the SquidCraft Games is surely a bad idea. All of the Andorran participants were eliminated from the tournament.

For those unaware of what a DDoS attack is, CloudFlare.com brings a compelling answer:

DDoS attacks are carried out with networks of Internet-connected machines. … When a victim’s server or network is targeted by the botnet, each bot sends requests to the target’s IP address, potentially causing the server or network to become overwhelmed, resulting in a denial-of-service to normal traffic.

Sadly, such events don’t rarely happen over the internet. We hope that as few people as possible will have to deal with such attacks, from now on.