Readers of a number of Vietnamese news websites have been unable to gain access since last night, October 12, only receiving error messages when they visit these sites.
Error message
In the afternoon, some websites including Soha, Kenh14 and Afamily have come online again, albeit at slow speeds, while others, such as Dantri are still experiencing the problem.
It is rumoured that these websites were the target of botnet attacks. This would not the first time that Vietnamese news websites were attacked. Last year, several online newspapers were targets of a series of attacks.
Vietnam Communications Corporation (VC Corp), an information technology and electronic communications company which provides and maintains the systems of many websites, commented that this was not a hacker attack.
Nguyen The Tan, deputy head of VC Corp, said its data center was having problems which cause errors in the systems of their customers. VC Corp is trying to fix the problems as quick as possible. The true cause of the problem has not been determined.
