Dhiraagu apologises for internet outage, offers a special discount

The telecoms giant Dhiraagu has announced a “special discount” for all of its broadband customers after cyber attacks disrupted internet service across the Maldives for more than a week.

Apologising for the outage, Mohamed Mirushan, a spokesman for the national telecoms firm, said the discount will be included in January’s internet bill. A rate has not been finalised yet.

“All our fixed broadband customers will get this special discount. We decided to give this offer to fixed broadband customers because they were the most affected,” he said.

Dhiraagu blamed the service outage on DDoS or distributed denial of service attacks from unknown culprits.

The company has refused to comment on the number of customers affected.

Ooredoo Maldives, Dhiraagu’s sole competitor, said that its mobile data customers had faced temporary outages, but its broadband service customers were not affected.

The January attacks began in the first week of the month, and intensified between January 10-13, causing internet service to grind to a halt.

DDoS attacks work by bombarding targeted web services with traffic and overloading its servers. In November, DDOS attacks brought down the Bank of Maldives’ internet banking services.

Global DDoS attacks on the rise: In October, some of the most popular sites on the web, including Twitter, Netflix, Reddit, Spotify and newspapers, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Guardian, were taken offline in one of the largest DDoS attacks ever reported.