Experts Express Doubt Over Authenticity of US DDoS Attack

Widespread outages and issues across several different online platforms have led some to believe that the United States is facing a major DDoS attack. However, according to experts, that may not be the case. In light of these technical issues popping up on Instagram, T-Mobile, and a variety of other platforms and services, experts have expressed doubts over the United States being under an actual DDoS attack.

Numerous experts acknowledged this possible DDoS attack on Twitter, telling their followers that there has been nothing to indicate that reports of an attack are accurate. Malware Tech posted the map that has been floating around online, which seemingly suggests that the United States was under a DDoS attack. However, they noted that the map does not indicate an attack and that it "lacks context to make any inferences at all." Matthew Prince, the co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, which is a web-infrastructure and website-security company, wrote on Twitter that the reality of the matter is that T-Mobile has specifically had a variety of issues with their network on Monday, which has possibly led people to believe that there is a much larger issue going on.

There’s a lot of buzz right now about a “massive DDoS attack” targeting the US, complete with scary-looking graphs (see Tweet below). While it makes for a good headline in these already dramatic times, it’s not accurate. The reality is far more boring. 1/X https://t.co/4wDIlKnfQg

— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) June 15, 2020

Prince noted that this whole matter ties back to issues that T-Mobile experienced on Monday. He wrote that the company made changes to their network and that it, unfortunately, went "badly." As a result, T-Mobile users have been experiencing a wide array of problems with the service. In his Twitter thread, Prince went on to explain precisely what he and Cloudflare believe is actually going on across the internet today.

"From @Cloudflare's vantage point, we can see a number of things that show there is no massive DDoS attack. First, traffic from WARP to supposedly impacted services is normal and has no increase in errors," Prince wrote. "Second, there is no spike in traffic to any of the major Internet Exchanges, which you do see during actual DDoS attacks and definitely would during one allegedly this disruptive." He ended his message by noting that they have not heard about any anomalies at any other major internet services, meaning that aside from the issues going on with T-Mobile, there is likely nothing worrisome happening.