Eircom’s internet users experienced another disruption to their internet service that took the service down for six and a half hours.
The news comes just on the heels of a cache-poisoning attack that left Eircom users without web services over the weekend of Sunday, 5 July and on the evening of Monday, 13 July.
‘Cache poisoning’ is a form of attack where the open-architecture of a domain name server (DNS) is altered to direct authentic web traffic to non-authentic web sites. Eircom users initially found that when they went to popular sites such as Facebook, Bebo and RTE, they were redirected to sites with pictures of scantily clad women.
In a statement this morning Eircom confirmed that users experienced an outage between 5.30pm and approximately midnight,when full service was restored.
“Yesterday afternoon’s disruption was caused by the combination of a processor failure and a fault on one of our international links,” the company said.
“Our technical teams have worked with our suppliers through the night to address the issue to avoid recurrence of the problem. We will continue to make further changes throughout the day.
“We expect that further significant service interruptions will be avoided, although there may be some minor service interruptions as necessary configuration changes take place.
“We appreciate our customers continued patience as we work to resolve these issues. eircom sincerely apologises for this interruption and we would like to reassure all affected customers that the company is making every effort to ensure a full service is maintained.”
Eircom said that users who continue to have difficulties accessing the internet should shut down and reboot their computer and broadband modem, via the power switch located at the rear of the modem.
“These steps should reset all applicable software and restore the network connection,” the company said.
By John Kennedy
