The Yukon government’s website and internal systems are back up and running after being taken down by a cyberattack on Thursday.
The territory was one of 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 Breaking: that it is “still investigating the nature of the outage” affecting its government homepage. The page appeared to still be down Thursday night.
In the Yukon, a Facebook post and memo sent to government employees early Thursday said the cyberattack occurred there, specifically, what the government called a distributed denial-of-service attack, in which someone sends an abnormally high volume of traffic to a network to overwhelm it. that—it started at midnight.
Officials do not believe there is any threat to citizens’ private data or government systems at this time, according to the post and memo, 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 was affected, according to the memo, and several employees were unable to access their government emails or phone-based services. on the Internet.
Government services in downtown Whitehorse appeared to be mostly 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 Thursday afternoon. An update from the government also said issues with its internal systems had also been resolved, although some other Yukon government websites may not yet be fully functional.
The update said that work continues to resolve any outstanding issues related to the attack and that another update with more details would be provided on Friday afternoon.
