UK telecom provider Colt says outages were due to cyber incident

London-based tech and telecom company Colt Technology Services said on Friday that it was still recovering from a cyberattack earlier this week, and it expected to post more information over the weekend.

After a series of initial updates about “technical issues,” the multinational company confirmed on Thursday that services such as Colt Online and the Voice API platform were offline due to a “cyber incident on an internal system.”

Colt did not describe the nature of the incident, but said it did not affect customers’ infrastructure. The company, owned by Fidelity Investments, has an array of business lines, including fiber networks, cloud and data center services, voice calling and security tools. 

“We have the capability of monitoring our customers’ networks and we continue to manage network incidents efficiently but we’re working in a more manual way than normal,” Colt said on Friday. “We’re working hard to get our automated monitoring capability fully restored.”

Colt urged customers to contact it by email or phone. 

“Please note that our response times might be a little slower than usual, but we’re doing everything we can to support you,” the company said.

Telecommunications companies in France, Luxembourg, South Africa and the U.S. Midwest have reported cyberattacks in recent months. The industry’s combination of critical infrastructure and high-value customer data make it a target for a wide range of threat groups, including ransomware gangs.

Beyond cybercrime, Western telecom firms are on high alert for activity by nation-state operations such as the China-linked group known as Salt Typhoon.