School system hit by DDoS attack; hundreds of schools affected

School system Magister was hit by a DDoS attack on Thursday evening. As a result, tens of thousands of pupils from hundreds of Dutch schools were unable to access their rosters, homework assignments and results. "It's a rough attack", a Magister spokesperson said to RTL Nieuws.

The school system went offline at around 6:00 p.m. Magister called in a specialized company to "suppress" the issue, and they managed to get the system back online at around 10:00 p.m.

Hundreds of pupils from all over the country complained about the outage on social media and on allestoringen.nl, the site where malfunctions are reported. "I have a test tomorrow and all practice materials are on Magister. This is really not a site that can be down, so either the people who hacked Magister do not understand what they are doing, or the organization really has to do better", one pupil wrote.

Over 500 schools in the Netherlands use Magister. It is not yet clear who is responsible for the attack.

In a DDoS attack, a website is bombarded with massive amounts of data. This overloads the site's server, and crashes the site.