It's been a chaotic weekend for streamers in Andorra. A denial of service attack (known as a DDoS attack) that affected Andorra Telecom and lasted practically the entire weekend, left multiple users in the principality without internet, including content creators such as AuronPlay, El Rubius or TheGrefg, who at that time were broadcasting live on Twitch.
The problems in the service of the only internet provider in Andorra began on Friday night, when several streamers were broadcasting on Twitch a championship called “SquidCraft Games”, which was played through a private Minecraft server. During the game, different creators unexpectedly left the live without the viewers knowing what was happening. Minutes later, Andorra Telecom confirmed the outage that affected both the Internet network and that of 4G.
“We inform you that the internet network is suffering a denial of service (DDoS) attack. For this reason, some users may have difficulty browsing the internet. We are mitigating it.”
The company confirmed to via Twitter after the fall that affected several streamers from Andorra. Although the problems were solved just over an hour later, the Andorran streamers decided to postpone the championship to the next day. “Tomorrow we will try again,” AuronPlay confirmed in a tweet. The attack, however, was carried out again on Saturday afternoon. Again, at a time when the creators were broadcasting the tournament where they simulated the tests of The Squid Game. Despite jokes from TheGrefg or Ibai, the attack caused several players affected by connection problems to be disqualified from the competition.
'They sought to harm the programming of some youtubers'
Credit: Unsplash It was not until Sunday that Andorra Telecom confirmed the target of the denial of service attacks that took place over the weekend. “Several denial of service (DDoS) attacks that sought to harm the programming of some youtubers (streamers), have affected the internet and 4G service of some Andorra Telecom clients on Friday and Saturday.”
But what exactly is a denial of service attack? The objective of a DDoS attack, like the one that has affected the streamers in Andorra, is to crash the servers to prevent that these work normally. To do this, multiple computers are used to execute requests at the same time, causing the servers to become saturated and, in most cases, stop working. It is likely that the capacity of Andorra Telecom's servers is limited considering that the micro-state has about 78,000 inhabitants, but it is strange that the main and only company that provides internet services to the principality is so vulnerable to an attack of these characteristics.
