Users in Ukraine have reported that Viasat KA-SAT internet service is down in the country, and the outage has spread to other countries in Europe. The likely culprit: a Russian cyberattack on the morning of Feb. 24.
Viasat announced Monday morning that it’s consulted cyber experts to investigate the outages. In a statement, the company said it believed the outages were linked to “a cyber event.”
- A source told Sky News that the outages were most likely the result of a distributed denial of service (DDos) attack that impacted Ukrainian banks and government websites before the invasion began.
- German internet service provider EUSANET is also reporting outages that began around the same time as both the Viasat outages and the Russian invasion.
- Golem, a German IT news site, reported Sunday that Viasat emailed partners with confirmation that broadband services across Europe were offline, starting Feb. 24 with Ukrainian spot beams.
Right now, along with investigating the root cause of the issue, Viasat says it is working to restore connectivity to its European customers.
Alternatives on the way? Elon Musk tweeted in response to a request from Mykhailo Fedorov, Digital Transformation Minister of Ukraine, on Saturday, saying that Starlink service was activated in the country and that more terminals are on the way. It’s unclear whether anyone has been able to access the service so far or how Musk is getting terminals to those in need.
