US hit by DDoS ‘attack’ as T-Mobile, Facebook, Fortnite down A sudden, widespread outage in online services has some worried America is under attack, but there might be more to it than that. A suspicious amount of online and communications services have gone down in the United States, leading some to suspect a co-ordinated attack designed to disrupt. Reports have been flooding in about a number of services having problems, including the country’s third largest mobile carrier, Facebook and its related Messenger and Instagram platforms, and the popular game Fortnite. The issues have been persisting for several hours, but a tweet from an account that claims to represent the global hacking group Anonymous has people thinking the situation is very serious. The map comes from the website Digital Attack Map, which tracks the “top daily DDOS attacks worldwide”. A DDOS attack is a Distributed Denial of Service attack designed to disrupt a web page or service and deny access to the people who actually want to use it. As opposed to an ordinary, direct denial of service attack, a DDOS attack comes from multiple sources, making them much more difficult to stop. The attack involves overloading a server with requests until it can no longer keep up. This is what happened to the Australian Census in 2016, and what government services minister Stuart Robert said happened to the Centrelink website as millions of newly jobless Australians flooded the website at the start of the pandemic. He had to walk back his claim that the website was hit with a DDOS attack a couple hours after making it when it emerged that it was not in fact the case. https://www.news.com.au/technology/online/hacking/us-hit-by-ddos-attack-as-tmobile-facebook-fortnite-down/news-story/d41781f7a61fc89283d143ed75add63f