Sputnik News Agency has suffered a large-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) cyber-attack on its network since 15:00 GMT of August 25, resulting in numerous disruptions to the functioning of its services and temporarily impeded access to its websites.
The attack has been going on for almost a day, but the news agency's IT specialists managed to deal with most sources of the threat. Most of these sources were located in the US, UK, Ukraine and Thailand, but some came from within Russia. The specialists suggest that one of the Russian cloud services could have been hacked and used for the DDoS attack on Sputnik.
According to one of the news agency's IT specialists, the attack was similar to the ones that Sputnik experienced in February and March this year.
The DDoS attack comes as Sputnik is silenced in numerous western countries – its websites are blocked and major social media platforms restricted access to its social media pages for Europeans, all at the request of western authorities.
The EU justified the move following the start of the Russian special military operation by claiming a need to stop Moscow's "propaganda" and distribution of "disinformation" about the situation in Ukraine. Similar measures were taken by Brussels against several other Russian media outlets. Sputnik interpreted the move as a brazen infringement on freedom of speech by European countries.
The Kremlin also condemned the western countries' actions against Russian media.
Apart from being slapped with the ban, Sputnik websites, namely the International, Polish and Czech versions, suffered from major DDoS attacks on February 26 – mere days after the start of the special military operation. During the attacks, the work of the news agency's websites and some of its services were disrupted.