THE UNIVERSITY’s official websites suffered an hours-long outage beginning Thursday night following an attack on the edu.ph domain used by multiple schools in the Philippines.

Websites such as the MyUSTe student portal and Guru’s Patio for teachers became inaccessible, with a notice stating that the “server IP address could not be found” appearing when attempting to access the sites.

UST’s online learning platform Canvas, which was on a different domain, was not affected by the problem.  

In a Facebook post on Friday morning, the UST Office of Information and Communications Technology confirmed the technical issue but said its service provider was resolving it. 

“Rest assured that the University’s online systems are intact and will be made available once the providers address the issue,” it said. “The University is closely working with PHNet, which operates all edu.ph domains.”

UST’s websites became accessible Friday afternoon. 

Domain operator Philippine Network Foundation Inc. (PHNet) told the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) that the issue stemmed from a denial of service (DoS) attack. 

A DoS attack involves attempting to overload a website or a network to degrade its performance or make it completely accessible, according to the National Cyber Security Centre. 

“We contacted them. And they are now trying to resolve the issue. May Denial of Service Attack daw sa kanila since 10 p.m. last night,” DICT Undersecretary Jeffrey Dy told GMA News Online.

In a Rappler report, domain operator PHNet said its servers were under “heavy load” since Thursday evening, resulting in a “slower than usual” resolution.

Also affected were the websites of the University of the Philippines, Colegio de San Juan de Letran, UST Angelicum College, De La Salle University, and Polytechnic University of the Philippines, among others.

Websites of schools under the .edu domain, such as Ateneo de Manila and STI College, were unaffected. 

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