If you subscribe to the satellite TV service Dish Network and cannot access its apps or even pay your bill, you are definitely not alone. The company has been experiencing issues on many of its systems since Thursday, according to The Verge.
The company"s websites have been hit with outages during this period, although they appear to be back online as of this writing. However, the main Dish.com page does still have a message stating, "We are experiencing a system issue that our teams are working hard to resolve." Some customers have also been unable to pay their bills, and Dish"s site says on that situation:
We are currently experiencing issues with processing payments and making account updates for some customers. If you are affected, you will not lose your service while we’re resolving this issue.
So what"s going on? The Verge"s report says Dish CEO Erik Carlson stated during the company"s financial conference call on Thursday that it was dealing with an "internal outage that’s continuing to affect our internal servers and IT telephony." However, the company is reportedly keeping most of its employees in the dark about what"s happening with this extended outage. The DownDetector.com site currently shows a large number of outage reports.
BleepingComputer.com reports, via unnamed sources at Dish, that the company has fallen victim to a cyber attack. One of the sources says that it had received a message from a Dish manager claiming that the outages "was caused by an outside bad actor, a known threat agent". We will note that Dish has not officially stated that its current problems are due to any cyber attacks, so take this report with a grain of salt. Even if it"s not due to hackers, Dish Network"s internal systems are definitely having problems at the moment.