Dish Network says that a cybersecurity incident caused the network outage

One of the biggest television providers in the country, Dish Network, recently admitted that a previously reported "network outage" was caused by a cyberattack that hit the business' internal messaging platforms and customer-facing help websites.

“Certain data was extracted,” the company said in a statement Tuesday. The acknowledgment is an evolution from last week’s earnings call, where it was described as an “internal outage.”

Dish Network has now confirmed that "internal communications [and] customer call centres" are still impacted by the incident, despite the company's website being unavailable for several days starting last week. Dish announced that it had hired outside specialists to help with the evaluation of the issue.

The intrusion happened early on February 23, the day the business released its fourth-quarter earnings. Dish CEO W. Erik Carlson said that they encountered an internal outage that's continuing to impact their internal servers and IT telephony. While working to promptly restore the affected systems, they’re examining the root causes and potential repercussions of the outage.

Users have also encountered "authentication troubles" while using their Dish Network logins to access pay TV channel apps like MTV or Starz, according to BleepingComputer. According to The Verge, a Dish manager informed their staff via email that they would not be able to access the company's computers remotely due to an "internal system issue."