‘Cyber Armageddon’ in Europe: Thousands go offline following Russia-Ukraine war, says report

Many parts of Europe have been knocked off the internet after it encountered massive “cyberattacks” at the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, news agency AFP reports.

According to telecom company Orange, around 9,000 users of its satellite internet service are without internet following a "cyber event" on February 24 at Viasat, a US satellite operator of which it is a client.

The same was witnessed by one-third of 40,000 subscribers of Eutelsat, the parent company of the bigblu satellite internet service.

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According to reports, the outage was felt in Germany, France, Hungary, Greece, Italy and Poland.

On Wednesday,Viasat said that a “cyber event” had caused a "partial network outage" for customers "in Ukraine and elsewhere" in Europe who rely on its KA-SAT satellite.

So far there is no evidence suggesting which country was behind the cyberattacks, with Viasat only saying that “police and state partners” had been notified and were assisting with investigations.

Chief of France's Space Command General Michel Friedling confirmed that there had been a cyberattack on a civilian network —Viasat.

"For several days, shortly after the start of operations, we have had a satellite network that covers Europe and Ukraine in particular, which was the victim of a cyberattack, with tens of thousands of terminals that were rendered inoperative immediately after the attack," AFP quoted Friedling as saying.

It is being reported that around 5,800 wind turbines in Germany and Central Europe—which has a combined output of 11 gigawatts—were also affected by the cyberattacks.

In Russia, institutional websites were made inaccessible from abroad, to protect them from denial of service (DOS) attacks that regularly rendered them inoperable.

(With inputs from agencies)