Kyivstar, Ukraine’s largest mobile and internet provider, said Russian hackers were responsible for shutting down its services on Tuesday.
More than 24.3 million Kyivstar customers lost phone reception, banks reported disruptions to their services and Ukrainians in the country’s eastern war zone were left without a connection. State-owned Privatbank, Ukraine’s largest bank, also reported issues at terminals connected with Kyivstar.
“Unfortunately, the war with Russia has several dimensions. One of them is in cyberspace,” said Kyivstar CEO Oleksandr Komarov in a video statement. “Today Kyivstar became the target of a powerful hacker attack, as a result of which mobile and internet services became temporarily unavailable.”
Stable mobile services have been crucial for Ukraine since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, as smartphones have been used to send air raid alerts and donations to the army, and to transfer money to Ukrainians living in Russian-occupied zones.
Ukraine’s largest digital banking service, Monobank, which is often used for military donations within the country, also reported a massive cyberattack targeting its systems on Tuesday.
“Massive DDoS attack on Mono,” the bank’s co-founder Oleh Gorokhovsky said in a statement, referring to a distributed-denial-of-service attack. “Object of attack: entry points to Amazon (banks, website). Everything is under control.” Gorokhovsky later claimed the attack had been repelled.
By 8 p.m. local time Tuesday, Kyivstar had partially restored fixed-line operations, but work on other areas was ongoing, with the company aiming to return services to normal on Wednesday. In a statement, Kyivstar thanked Ukrainian intelligence and law enforcement services for helping in “an unprecedented situation.”
The firm promised compensation to its corporate clients.
