2 december 2021

DDoS attack on Bandwidth Left Users without Voice Communication

The incident took place at the end of September and caused a lot of problems for the company's customers. It is worth recalling that Bandwidth is a communications platform that provides U.S. companies with VoIP telephony services. She uses its voice IP network for cloud-based voice and messaging, with connectivity to 911 services. The DDoS attack, which began on the evening of September 25, resulted in voice outages across the United States. The assault continued for several days.

The first comment about the incident appeared on Tuesday, September 28. It was a message from Bandwidth CEO David Morken on the company's official website. He told customers and partners that his company and several critical communications service providers had been hit by a massive DDoS attack. "While we have mitigated much-intended harm, we know some of you have been significantly impacted by this event. For that, I am truly sorry." - quote.

The co-founder of the company intentionally mentioned other vendors. Since Bandwidth is one of the major players in the U.S. VoIP market, DDoS attacks have affected other companies in that sector as well. Twilio, Accent, DialPad, and other VoIP providers reported outages in the last days of September. A little earlier, a well-known US-Canadian provider VoIP.ms was subjected to a prolonged DDoS attack, which knocked out many servers and left users without voice services.

Many Bandwidth customers have seen a connection between these incidents. This is not surprising since the services that companies provide are usually routed over the Internet. Their servers and endpoints must be publicly accessible, making them prime targets for DDoS ransomware attacks. DDoS attack operators overload servers, portals, and gateways sending more requests than can be handled. As a result, target devices and servers become unavailable to users.

Bandwidth seems to have succeeded in fixing the problem after much work to restore and minimize the consequences of the DDoS attack. But it is not known to the end whether the hackers stopped their attacks themselves or their extortion demand was satisfied. Either way, it was a major shake-up, to which the stock market reacted quickly. The company's stock has halved in value since hitting a 52-week high of nearly $200. Nevertheless, Wall Street analysts are predicting a subsequent rise, of course, if the company draws appropriate conclusions after what happened.