Category Archives: Internet

GO Internet outages in Malta

Yesterday, GO’s Internet service was down in Malta right after GO posted about their Christmas party. Users were very unhappy, including people who were abroad and using roaming on their phones. Data Roaming was not working for them and it was not working for any foreign sim cards used in Malta too. The service was restored after 3 hours for some, for others after 4.

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APS Bank, HSBC Bank (Malta) and Lidl (Malta) are three of many websites Chrome will be labelling unsafe

Unfortunately it turns out that APS Bank is one of many websites Chrome will be labelling unsafe next April.  Also, HSBC Bank Malta, Lidl Malta and Next will be labelled unsafe next October.

[UPDATE – The websites were all updated thus will not be labelled unsafe!]

According to computer security engineer Arkadiy Tetelman, who works at Airbnb according to his blog, out of one million websites he tested, just 11,510 are going to go be labelled unsafe in April, with 91,627 which will be blocked next October.

 

As the register explains, “thanks to a decision in September by Google to stop trusting Symantec-issued SSL/TLS certs, from mid-April Chrome browser users visiting websites using a certificate from the security biz issued before June 1, 2016 or after December 1, 2017 will be warned that their connection is not private and someone may be trying to steal their information. They will have to click past the warning to get to the website.

APS Bank is one the text list of unsafe domains which can be found here. The certificates of these domains will be untrusted from next April. Similarly, HSBC Bank Malta is on the list of unsafe domain certificates which will be untrusted from next October. It can be found here.

I wrote to APS Bank, Lidl Malta and Next Malta via Facebook to let them know of this. HSBC does not allow messaging.

UPDATE: APS Bank and Lidl wrote to me informing me that they are working on the issue. Great news!

 

Worldwide panic among users as Facebook stops working for some minutes

A few minutes ago, Facebook had a worldwide outage. Users all over the world found it impossible to post anything on their timelines, pages and groups.

Many users started panicking when they saw the following error message (see photo) which blocked users from using Mark Zuckerberg’s platform.

It took a number of minutes for Facebook’s technicians to solve the problem and get Facebook back online.

From our tests, tweets and posts on Google+, it seems that on the Internet Facebook was temporarily unreachable from all over the world for around 30 minutes. It affected other sites such as Socialbakers.