According to New Zealand newswire reports, a DDoS attack on Hurricane Electric - the US West Coast peering ISP – was struck by a distributed denial of service attack on Monday night (Californian time), with the attack lasting around three hours.
Whilst this probably went unnoticed in the US, these times translated into 11am to 2pm New Zealand time for Vodafone NZ customers, who did notice.
Reporting on the outage, the New Zealand Herald says that when when Hurricane Electric went down, Vodafone NZ users were unable to gain access to some websites in the US. The paper quotes Vodafone communication spokesman Matt East as saying that residential, business and mobile internet customers were affected.
"People who were browsing locally probably wouldn't have noticed", he told the paper, adding that it could have affected all of the firm's customers if they had been browsing internationally.
"Websites such as the Washington Post ... you just couldn't get to them, they were just cut off."