DDoS Attack Paralyzes Access to Norway's Government Services

The Norwegian Digitalisation Agency (Digitaliseringsdirektoratet, Digdir) has reported an ongoing denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that has disrupted key infrastructure of the country's e-government.

What happened

According to the agency's status page, the problems began at around 00:50 on Monday, 3 August 2026. They were later attributed to a DDoS strike against ID-porten — the central single sign-on service through which citizens authenticate to government online services. The system is operated by a Digdir contractor, the company Vivicta.

The attack affected not only ID-porten itself (including the MinID mechanism), but also a whole range of related solutions: the Altinn platform, the register of contact details and opt-outs from electronic communication (KRR), the Maskinporten, Ansattporten and eFormidling services, the ELMA/PEPPOL network, the eInnsyn portal and self-service solutions. The practical impact was significant: users were unable to log in to public services.

How the incident unfolded

Judging by the timeline of updates, the specialists worked almost continuously. By 13:40 on 3 August, traffic to the affected services began to recover and the situation stabilised briefly. However, at around 17:55 the outages resumed, and by evening the number of errors in ID-porten had risen sharply — the team set about applying “mitigating measures.”

By midnight things had not eased. In an update at 00:08 on 4 August, the agency acknowledged that the error rate in ID-porten remained high and that work was continuing. Most of the other solutions were functioning, though users could still encounter instability and varying response times. The next update was scheduled for around 07:30.

Why it matters

ID-porten is, in essence, a single point of access for citizens to a multitude of government digital services. The failure of such a hub vividly illustrates the flip side of centralised authentication: a single successful attack can shut down access to an entire set of public services at once. Digdir has not disclosed details about the source of the attack or its scale — its public statements refer only to technical countermeasures taken together with the contractor.

Source: Hacker News