MTN says connectivity at its Gallo Manor data centre has been restored following a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack on the Johannesburg site earlier this afternoon.
MTN alerted clients just after 3pm today that it had suffered a DDOS attack, which resulted in packet loss and a disturbance to clients' cloud services. At the time the company said MTN Business' network operations centre (NOC) was working on resolving the problem to avoid any further attacks.
This comes less than two days after a power outage at the same data centre caused loss of connectivity.
MTN chief technology officer Eben Albertyn says, while the DDOS attack today hampered the company's ability to provide connectivity services, engineers worked "fervently" to fully restore services and avert further attacks, and connectivity was restored soon after.
"The interruption lasted only a few minutes and is completely unrelated to the outage experienced on Monday. MTN wishes to apologise profusely to its customers for any inconvenience caused."
On Sunday evening just after 6pm, MTN's Gallo Manor data centre went offline, causing major disruptions to clients' services, including Afrihost.
MTN put the outage down to a power outage. The problem persisted until the next day, with services being restored around 11am on Monday.
Digital Attack Map defines DDOS attack as: "An attempt to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources." The live data site notes these attacks can target a wide variety of important resources, from banks to news Web sites, and present a major challenge to making sure people can publish and access important information.
Update
On Wednesday 6 May, at about 1:10 pm, MTN sent out an update revealing that the issues resulting from the cyber attack had not been resolved, as the company initially claimed.
"Please note that we are continuing to experience DDOS attacks at our data centre in Gallo Manor, which are causing service interruptions."
MTN said its Internet service provider NOC was "closely monitoring the environment". It added the continued attacks would be blocked immediately as they came through to the network.
"Our Core teams are currently working on a permanent solution with the vendor. We will keep [clients] updated with the developments."