The Northwest Territories government has formally attributed a website outage earlier this week to “what appears to be a distributed denial of service incident.”
That’s a form of cyberattack in which an attacker floods a website with fabricated traffic to stop any regular users reaching it.
GNWT websites were offline for some residents at various times on Thursday, and there were isolated reports of outages continuing for a few users into Friday. A registration deadline for South Slave evacuees needing flights home was extended as a result of the disruption.
The governments of Yukon, Nunavut, Manitoba, Prince Edward Island, Saskatchewan and Quebec have also been hit by similar outages this week.
“The GNWT is aware that a number of Canadian government websites have experienced service disruptions from what appears to be a distributed denial of service incident,” a spokesperson for the NWT’s Department of Finance, which controls the territory’s information technology, said by email on Friday afternoon.
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“GNWT websites are up and running again,” the spokesperson wrote.
“Users may experience temporary outages again as the disruption runs its course, but GNWT staff are addressing the situation.”
The territory gave no indication of the party it considered to be responsible, though a Quebec minister earlier in the week attributed an attack to a group of pro-Russian hackers named NoName.
