Distributed-denial-of-service attack began at midnight in Yukon; Nunavut gov’t still investigating its outage

The Yukon government’s website and its internal systems are once again functioning after being brought down by a cyberattack on Thursday.

The territory was among several jurisdictions where government websites crashed on Thursday, including Nunavut, P.E.I., Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

The Nunavut government has not confirmed a cyberattack, but confirmed to CBC News that it’s “still investigating the nature of the outage” affecting its main government page. The page appeared to still be down on Thursday evening.

In the Yukon, a Facebook post and memo sent to government employees earlier Thursday said the cyberattack there — specifically, what the government called a distributed-denial-of-service attack, where someone sends an abnormally high volume of traffic to a network to overwhelm it — began at midnight.

Officials don’t believe there’s any threat to private citizen data or government systems at this point, the post and memo said, nor has there been any authorized access to government files.

However, access to Yukon government Wi-Fi, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and other cloud-based software were affected, according to the memo, and a number of employees were unable to access their government emails or internet-based phone services.

Government services in downtown Whitehorse appeared to be mostly still operational Thursday morning, although wait-times were longer and some offices, including motor vehicles, were only accepting cash payments.

Access to the Yukon government’s main website was restored by late Thursday afternoon. An update from the government also said issues with its internal systems had also been resolved, though some other Yukon government websites may not be fully functional yet.

The update said work is continuing to resolve any outstanding problems related to the attack, and that another update with more details would be provided by Friday afternoon.