WELLINGTON (Reuters) -New Zealand’s third largest internet provider Vocus NZ said on Friday its response to a cyberattack temporary triggered a widespread internet outage.
The company said its systems blocked a denial of service (DDoS) attack on one user but in doing so caused some Vocus customers in the country’s largest cities – Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch – to suffer outages.
Vocus said the issue was resolved within 30 minutes.
“We are working closely with the vendor of this platform to understand why this occurred,” said a company spokesperson.
A DDoS attack is a way in which hackers disrupt a server by overwhelming it with a flood of internet traffic.
(Reporting by Praveen Menon in Wellington and Colin Packham in Canberra; Editing by Robert Birsel and Edwina Gibbs)