The Russian communications provider UIS battled a severe distributed denial-of-service attack beginning around midday April 19th, causing extensive service disruptions for over three days. The company acknowledged the powerful cyber campaign via their Telegram channel, later noting an intensification in the assault's strength which hampered restoration efforts.
Downdetector graphs visually confirmed a massive surge in outage reports coinciding with the company's announcements. User comments on social media painted a picture of widespread operational paralysis; customers reported failures with phone numbers linked through providers like MTS and Megafon, inaccessible CRM functions, and significant business interruption, with some lamenting a lost workday.
UIS communicated that their engineers were engaged around the clock, striving to maintain critical infrastructure availability. They directed users to a dedicated Telegram channel for ongoing updates. In response to customer frustration about the prolonged downtime, the provider detailed its defense mechanisms, involving state radio frequency oversight, filtering by backbone network partners, and their own finer-grained traffic analysis systems.
Despite these layers, UIS admitted struggling due to the attack's evolving nature and periodic increases in intensity, requiring constant adaptation of their filtering algorithms. While battling the persistent cyber offensive, the company reported partial success in restoring some functionalities, including voice calls, though full recovery remained a challenge.
