Ubuntu infrastructure down for over a day

For more than 24 hours, the core web infrastructure of Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical has been offline following a sustained attack that began Thursday morning. The outage has crippled the operating system provider’s ability to communicate normally, compounding a separate crisis involving the mishandled disclosure of a major security vulnerability.

Throughout the past day, users attempting to access most Ubuntu and Canonical websites, as well as download critical OS updates from official servers, have encountered persistent failures. In a notable exception, mirror sites have continued to distribute updates without interruption. A sparse Canonical status page acknowledged the situation, stating: “Canonical’s web infrastructure is under a sustained, cross-border attack and we are working to address it.” Beyond that brief statement, officials from both Ubuntu and Canonical have maintained complete radio silence since the incident began.

The outage is being claimed by a group sympathetic to the Iranian government. According to posts on Telegram and other social platforms, the group is responsible for a DDoS attack leveraging a tool called Beam. While Beam is ostensibly designed to test server resilience under heavy traffic, it operates as a “stressor” service , a front that allows paying miscreants to launch takedowns against third-party sites. In recent days, the same pro-Iran group has also taken credit for DDoS attacks on eBay, highlighting a pattern of cross-border disruption that has plagued the internet for decades.