Deutsche Telekom said that it could have been the victim of a hacking attack after around 900,000 broadband customers started seeing coverage outages starting yesterday.
The outages have affected customers throughout Germany with certain types of routers.
“Based on the error pattern, we cannot exclude the possibility that the routers have been targeted by external parties with the result that they can no longer register on the network,” the company said in a statement.
The effects of the issue vary, it added: “Some customers are experiencing temporary problems or very marked fluctuations in quality, but there are also customers for whom the service is not working at all.”
And, there are no geographic consensus, lending more credence to the idea that it’s a router hack. “There are no localised focal points,” DT said. “The fact that the error pattern occurs more in metropolitan areas is due to population distribution, which means it is purely a statistical conclusion.”
Service is being restored slowly, and the network is fully operational.
“Experts from Deutsche Telekom and the router manufacturers have already been working on a solution,” the company said. "In case of problems, we still recommend disconnecting your router from the network, even if this did not necessarily have the desired effect yesterday.”
DT is offering customers with a mobile contract a free ‘day-flat’ pass to use its mobile broadband network. Those customers who do not have a mobile contract are being advised to go to DT shops.
Photo © Nelia Sapronova