Docomo Pacific cyberattack knocks out internet and phone services in Guam and the CNMI

Docomo Pacific, the largest provider of mobile, television, internet and telephone services in Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, disclosed that attackers compromised some of its servers early on Friday 17 March 2023.

The company said its security technicians triggered failsafe protocols, shut down the affected servers and isolated the intrusion. That containment step, rather than the attack itself, accounted for much of the outage that followed. Home and business internet, digital home phone, the dTV+ television service, prepaid top-up portals and access to guam.net email addresses all went down. President and chief executive Roderick Boss said customer data, the mobile network and fiber services were unaffected.

Guam and the CNMI have a combined population of more than 220,000. Restoration was uneven. Service returned to parts of Guam and the CNMI over the weekend of 18 and 19 March, other villages waited longer, and some customers reported problems into the following week. The company offered subscribers free mobile tethering as a stopgap and said its stores and call centres were operating with reduced functionality.

Docomo Pacific never gave a completion date for full restoration and did not say whether ransomware was involved. A Facebook update on the recovery drew enough angry replies that the company removed the post. It was the second cyberattack reported on Guam that month, following an intrusion at the Guam Memorial Hospital Authority on 2 March.