edu.ph servers hit by DDoS, schools affected

Several educational institutions in the Philippines reported difficulties accessing their websites using the edu.ph domain on Friday, January 24.

Universities like the University of the Philippines (UP), De La Salle University, and others informed their stakeholders about a technical issue that could affect online services.

The Philippine Network Foundation Inc. (PHNet) confirmed that servers handling the edu.ph domain experienced heavy load since Thursday evening, lasting until Friday night when more servers were deployed to resolve the issue.

Access to affected websites was restored over the weekend, with PHNet president Horacio Cadiz stating that traffic was five times higher than normal during the peak of the disruption.

Schools are collaborating with PHNet and the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) to address the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that caused the technical difficulties.

A DDoS attack involves flooding servers with internet traffic, preventing users from accessing websites, as seen in recent disruptions to news websites such as Rappler and ABS-CBN News.

While school emails and learning management systems like Canvas and Blackboard remained accessible, users on carriers like Globe and Smart experienced problems accessing some online systems.