Lincoln WiFi was hit by a nationwide cyber attack

A cyber attack caused the WiFi network to shut down this morning.

The Network called Janet is responsible for the .ac.uk and .gov.uk domains used by universities and colleges across the country. The Janet network identified the issue and reported it to their twitter page at 9:48am.

It caused massive inconvenience to students struggling to get their assignments in during the busy Christmas period.

Students at The University of Lincoln, among other institutions, were affected by the attack.

Erin Heywoord, Business and Marketing student, said: “”I didn’t even know all of them [the wifi network] were linked up – you’d think they’d have had some sort of back up in place.”

The network came under a persistent Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), often carried out by criminal perpetrators.

Daniel De Barrie, IT Service Desk Assistant, said: “The network was down from nine am, the third party provider was attacked in Sheffield and also affected The University of Manchester’s WIFI.”

Daniel added: “To my knowledge we managed to get it back up and running at midday.”

The ICT support desk apologised for the inconvenience: “Sorry – it was out of our control.”