Dish Network, the television provider and satellite/telecoms company, has been hacked, according to a statement published Tuesday on its website. Dish — which owns Boost Mobile, Sling TV, and, weirdly, the last remaining scraps of Blockbuster, among other subsidiaries — has been experiencing significant disruption since February 23.
Still, days later, the company hasn’t recovered. Its primary website, dish.com, remains gutted except for a notice of “a system issue that our teams are working hard to resolve.” Some of the corporation’s other related sites, like dishwireless.com, are completely down. Internally, employees of Dish and its subsidiaries haven’t been able to access their remote desktops or internal communication system to actually work, accord to a report from The Verge. Customers have reported being unable to pay their television or phone bills because of the outage.
Though the company claims its services “should not be interrupted during this time,” in the pre-recorded message that’s replaced its customer service phone line, there’s been a noted uptick in reported service outages in recent days, per Down Detector. In short: it’s been chaos for Dish Network and its customers these past few days.
Now, the company has admitted the ongoing disruption is the result of a “cybersecurity incident.” In its statement, Dish wrote that the breach “has affected some of our internal communications, customer call centres, and internet sites.” Further, the company noted that on Monday, it “became aware that certain data was extracted from our IT systems as part of this incident.”
The company said its investigation into the breach is ongoing, and that it doesn’t currently known if any customer data was accessed by the hackers. “The security of our customers’ data is important to us, and if we learn that information was compromised, we’ll take appropriate steps and let any impacted customers know,” Dish wrote.
Both cybersecurity experts and law enforcement are aware of and involved in addressing the Dish breach, the company said — however, Dish didn’t offer any details of when the various, persisting problems might be resolved.
“As a result of this incident, many of our customers are having trouble reaching our service desks, accessing their accounts, and making payments,” Dish said in the statement. “We’re making progress on the customer service front every day, including ramping up our call capacity, but it will take a little time before things are fully restored.”