Canonical hit by cross border DDoS, Ubuntu services down

Ubuntu infrastructure operated by Canonical has been offline since Thursday morning, with attempts to connect to most Ubuntu and Canonical webpages and download OS updates failing over the past 24 hours. Updates from mirror sites have continued to work normally, and a Canonical status page said: “Canonical’s web infrastructure is under a sustained, cross-border attack and we are working to address it.” The outage has hampered communication following a botched disclosure of a major vulnerability.

A group sympathetic to the Iranian government has taken credit for the outage, according to posts on Telegram and other social media, with claims of a DDoS attack using Beam. Researchers noted that infrastructure downtime has limited Ubuntu’s ability to communicate security guidance to affected users.