As hundreds of thousands of people reported mobile carriers and internet services down, and ‘DDoS’ started trending on Twitter, ‘Anonymous’ laid the blame on China and suggested a major cyber-attack was underway. Here’s what actually happened.
Early in the afternoon of June 15, people across the U.S. started noticing that they were unable to make calls or send text messages. Customer complaints soon popped up on social media suggesting multiple mobile carriers were all experiencing outages. But that wasn’t all: internet service providers, the social media platforms themselves, and online services from gaming to banking were all apparently going down like dominoes.
As reported by Jesse Damiani, the plot thickened as a supposed Anonymous news account with 6.5 million followers stirred the pot. YourAnonCentral tweeted that “The U.S. is currently under a major DDoS attack,” and included a handy attack map showing just how bad things looked. But looks can be deceiving, as can tweets from these accounts claiming Anonymous affiliation.
Pretty soon, the DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) hashtag was trending on Twitter, and anyone experiencing any connectivity issue was blaming this major cyber-attack. A cyber-attack, YourAnonCentral speculated, that was initiated by China. It didn’t take long for other media outlets to notice the story and publish articles claiming this was the “Largest cyber attack in history” amongst other things.
Kurgen