Ukraine internet battered but not out

While the physical war in Ukraine is already a humanitarian disaster, the virtual war over the internet and the tech companies that run it and use it will likely get a lot worse. That’s because for the most part the actual internet network has withstood the onslaught since Russia invaded Ukraine. There have been outages and extreme slowness in parts of the country and malware or other threats have proliferated but in general—to the surprise of many—the network has been pretty resiliant considering the extreme circumstances, experts say. That’s not to say there haven’t been serious problems. The internet research team at ThousandEyes said it detected significant levels of internet traffic disruption and reduced availability of key Ukrainian banking, defense and other government websites. “The patterns of disruption are consistent with network behavior we have observed during other distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, as well as indicative of potential countermeasures that may have been taken by service operators to mitigate impacts to their service,” ThousandEyes stated March 4.