For the past two days - users of BTL's broadband service have been taken back to the early 90's - a time before the internet. That's after both DSL and 4G services have become thoroughly unreliable, leaving users in an electronic abyss, unable to surf the net, or even check emails. It's caused major business bottlenecks, personal inconvenience, and don't even talk about the Facebook and WhatsApp withdrawal!
So what's behind it? And is BTL to blame? Well, today the company held a press conference to say it isn't - and that's because their servers are under attack by international hackers. For those not familiar with the technology, those servers connect you to the internet. Well, in an attack, hackers blitz BTL's servers with requests, overloading them, thereby killing your internet service.
Who's behind it - and when will it end? Those are the questions we asked at a press conference this afternoon:..
Kevin Hope, Chief Technology Officer - BTL
"What we have been having over the last few weeks has been a number on these servers and what has happen is that the attacks have pretty much overwhelm these servers to the point where they have created a large load on these servers to the point where they are not able to properly process the requests that are coming from our customers."
Dr. Dionne Miranda, General Manager of Customer Services
"These cyber attacks are happening around the world in real time and we are just now one of the victims, but we are going to emerge as the victor very soon because we are finding a solution to that."
Kevin Hope
"Over the last few days we have seen where these attacks have pretty much intensified and so we have been putting a lot of efforts in terms of working on these attacks coming up with a plan going forward, in terms of how we can return our service completely back to normal."
Dr. Dionne Miranda
"We have seen recovery at certain hours within the day as the technicians and engineers have been working only for the attacks to actually ramp up and then cause us to go down again."
Kevin Hope
"In terms of the parties that might be responsible for this we at this time are not in a position where we can say for sure. We have a clear idea of where the attacks are coming from in terms of regions and so on."
Reporter
"Are you concern that this might end up being costly and protract the bandwidth?"
Dr. Dionne Miranda
"We believe that at any time our customers question our reliability and it is costly because one of the things that is very important is our image and our image requires that there is a premise of quality that always surrounds our company, so it is costly whether it's a financial cost then that will have to be tabulated at some point. But the reality is that whenever our customers do not think well of us, we feel that its a huge enough loss and so yes it is costly to us at this point."
Kevin Hope
"Our intention is certainly to have service restore to our customers as soon as possible. But with the steps we are taking, we estimate that now and over the next 2-3 days before we are fully back to normal, but it could be very before then in deed."
Dr. Dionne Miranda
"Could we have been more prepared? I think that we are very prepared which is why we've been able to survive so well with this attack that has been so serious on our company."
For context, as that map we showed you illustrates, server attacks by the scores of thousands are always happening - many of them between the US and China. BTL says that the attacks on its system got so bad today that Belize was in the top ten of the server attack list.
Now, if you have a problem - you can call 119, but that is flooded with calls so it is hard to get through.
But you can text 10-10-275, with the details of where you are and what type of issue you are having. BTL says they will respond to that.
One workaround is to use Google's public server - and for the technically inclined and software adept, to do that you'd have to go into your advanced setting and use "8.8.8.8" as your DNS server. That's Google's public server.
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