Internet Slow Down After Global "Biggest Cyber Attack"

Web pages opening a little slower, some pages not opening at all and some sites completely unavailable? Videos streaming a little slower, or completely freezing? Your Facebook and Twitter updates taking forever to refresh? If that's what you've been experiencing in the past few hours then don't just blame your local Internet Service Provider (ISP). You're just part of a global Internet slowdown that has come about from within the biggest cyber-attack in the history of the online world.

Online Doomsday predictors have termed this the start of the end of the Internet and asked people to be prepared for a day where the Internet doesn't exist anymore.

Anybody trying to access the Internet within the path that this attack was travelling felt that the Net is dead. And as coincidences go, Etisalat, one of the biggest ISPs suffered a break in one of its fiber optic cables in the Mediterranean off the Egyptian coast near Alexandria. This led to most of the Middle East and others areas going dark too. Both were completely unrelated events though.

That would be gross exaggeration! While there is a noticeable slowdown in many parts - the Internet in itself isn't dying. This is the result of bloody battle between online companies - Spam-fighting organization Spamhaus is being subjected to a massive cyber-attack, from groups angry at being blacklisted by the Geneva-based company. Spamhaus reportedly suffered a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack which at times peaked at more than 300 billion bits per second (300Gbps) of data - three times higher than the previous record attack of 100 Gbps.

Cyberbunker, a web hosting service based in the Netherlands, has been named by reports as a potential culprit. It was recently added to one of Spamhaus's anti-spam lists. With more than 10,000 dedicated servers, and housed in a disused nuclear bunker, it offers anonymous hosting to its customers.

The attackers tried to overwhelm their target by sending it heavy traffic. A flood of requests to view a site at the same time will exceed its capacity — stopping it from loading. Spamhaus sought greater capacity, turning to CloudFlare, which can spread the traffic over a larger bandwidth. However, the attackers began targeting their attacks so they would be concentrated. This congestion was so heavy that it overwhelmed DNS routers, used to direct internet traffic. Internet users worldwide are having to endure slow connections after the biggest cyberattack in history.