ANGRY CUSTOMERS have criticised Eircom after a suspected “denial of service attack” left some people without an internet service for several hours on Monday night.
The company said a number of its internet customers suffered disruption to their service, saying “significant congestion” experienced by web users appeared to be related to an “unprecedented volume” of traffic deliberately directed at the network.
Denial of service attacks involve saturating a site with requests so it can no longer function properly or respond to genuine traffic. The outage began about 6pm and was resolved by 11.15pm, Eircom said.
Eircom users vented their frustration on numerous internet sites including Boards.ie and social networking site Twitter, complaining about how the incident had been handled.
However, Eircom said it had made attempts to communicate to customers through the media yesterday, and had updated a number of recorded messages on its customer support lines yesterday to reflect Monday night’s problem.
“Customers have clearly been frustrated,” said the company’s director of communications Paul Bradley. “We have apologised and asked them to understand that we are doing everything we can to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”
It was confirmed yesterday that the incident has been reported to the communications regulator, ComReg.
