Internet customers in San Bruno were back online Saturday night after city officials said a malicious IP attack prompted them to take the city-owned cable internet services offline.
San Bruno Municipal Cable is one of only a few city-owned cable and internet services on the West Coast. When it's system came under attack Friday night and Saturday morning, they decided to temporarily pull the plug.
"I kept like, turning my WiFi on, turning it off. Turning it back on, turning it off. Turning it on and it didn’t work at all," said San Bruno resident Skyy Warner.
Another customer said she had no phone service in the morning and her internet was crawling along at a snail's pace.
The cable service has about 28,000 customers and provides television, internet and phone services.
"We’ve done our best to protect our users from their IP information leaking out to these bad actors by shutting down the internet on our end and by monitoring the situation until such time that we figured traffic was back at a normal level and the attack had stopped," said system director Sandeep Krishnamurthy.
He added that Friday night issues got progressively worse when they saw a rush of suspicious internet traffic that was disabling their network.
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"At it’s worst this morning we were experiencing 300 gigabytes of inbound IP traffic which is very vastly greater than the normal 8 gigabytes we experience on a day to day basis," said Krishnamurthy.
By Saturday night, the service had mostly returned to normal.
It's not clear who was behind the attack or why San Bruno was targeted, but officials said they've also been seeing the IP attacks on other providers in the Bay Area.
It is not yet clear is anyone's personal information has been compromised.
