Arvig service shutdown on Tuesday was due to a cyber attack

DETROIT LAKES — The big service outage suffered by Arvig on Tuesday was the result of an apparently unsuccessful cyber attack on the Perham-based communications company, Arvig said in a statement to customers.

On Tuesday, Oct. 25, Arvig experienced a network-wide service outage affecting nearly all of its customers statewide. Beginning at approximately 6:45 a.m., internet, television and most voice services unexpectedly went down.

Internet and phone services were successfully restored by 10 a.m., followed by television service at noon. “This unprecedented incident, however, was a major inconvenience — to say the least —for our customers around Minnesota,” the release said.

Here’s what Arvig knows about what happened:

“Our early investigation has discovered that the incident was a targeted cybersecurity attack on Arvig’s critical data center operations — the facilities that house the core of our network and the source through which our internet services are delivered to you,” the release said.

“Though our investigation of this matter is still in its early stages, to our knowledge at this time, no customer data was exposed, accessed or lost as a result of this attack.”

Over the next few weeks, the company added, “we’ll be working with our internal teams and cybersecurity partners to identify the cause of this incident, evaluate our systems and implement new safeguards to ensure that an outage this widespread does not happen again.”

Arvig said it’s extremely rare for the company to see such a large-scale outage, but added that “cyberattacks are unfortunately a reality that we — like every other service provider — must be prepared for. Thanks to the security measures we had already developed and immediate action and coordinated response of Arvig’s IT, cybersecurity, networking and engineering teams, the threat was eliminated and services were restored within a matter of hours. Most importantly, your customer data was kept safe.”

In the statement, Arvig apologized for the inconvenience to customers, and thanked them for choosing Arvig as their service provider.