Repeated outages disrupt access to Estonia’s public e-services

Repeated outages in Estonia’s state authentication services have disrupted logins to public e-services in recent weeks, ERR reported on Thursday.

A further disruption occurred on October 1. Bret-Maria Rikko, a communications specialist at the State Information System Authority (RIA), said the incidents had different causes: one was a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack targeting the state authentication service, while others resulted from technical problems.

RIA has been unable to determine the DDoS attack’s motive or origin, Rikko said. The agency monitors the services continuously and responds to disruptions immediately. It has also introduced or is implementing additional measures to detect incidents earlier and respond more quickly, helping reduce outage durations.

Technical problems also caused outages on September 21 and 24, ERR reported.