MEO reports massive attack causing internet outages in Portugal

The Portuguese telecommunications operator MEO reported that its services were hit by a “massive attack” on Monday, causing significant internet and mobile network instability. The company stated that a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack targeted its international network infrastructure, leading to congestion and service degradation. MEO confirmed that mitigation measures were activated to restore stability and emphasized that there was no unauthorized access to customer or company data.

According to Downdetector, reports of service issues peaked with over 7,000 complaints, affecting users in major cities such as Lisbon, Porto, Braga, Coimbra, and Funchal. While other operators like NOS, Vodafone, and DIGI also experienced some instability, they were significantly less affected than MEO.

However, some network analysts have challenged the official explanation. Citing data from Cloudflare Radar and IPinfo, analysts suggest the disruption may have been caused by a “route leak” involving Ghana Telecom. This technical phenomenon involves the incorrect announcement of subnets via the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which can cause traffic to be misrouted through international intermediaries.