Dish Network confirms 'cybersecurity incident' caused multi-day outage of websites, customer service systems

• Dish Network's websites and customer service lines were down for much of the last week.
• Employees reportedly were kept in the dark about the cause of the issue, with some unable to work.

Dish Network confirmed in a statement Tuesday that a "cybersecurity incident" was the reason for outages of the company's websites and customer service phone lines over the past week.

"On February 27, we became aware that certain data was extracted from our IT systems as part of this incident," Dish said in its Tuesday statement. "It's possible the investigation will reveal that the extracted data includes personal information."

The statement continued: "The forensic investigation and assessment of the impact of this incident is ongoing. The security of our customers' data is important to us, and if we learn that information was compromised, we'll take the appropriate steps and let any impacted customers know."

Beginning last Thursday, customers reported issues calling the company and paying bills on social media, and Dish's support account repeatedly cited an "internal systems issue" as the cause.

Many found the Dish.com website blank except for the company's logo with a message that read: "We apologize for any disruptions you may be having. We are experiencing an internal system issue and our teams are working hard to restore systems as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience."

By Saturday morning, a similar message still was displayed, but information was added about available TV packages and getting more information about the company's services by email. Several other Dish sites still were offline as of Saturday morning, and attempting to go to a URL like Dish.com/contact returned a "Not Found" message.

More of Dish's websites are up as of Wednesday morning, and some still display a "thank you for your patience" message at the top, stating that the company is still working to improve services since last week's outage."

Dish's stock has fallen over the last year since it surpassed $33 per share in April 2022, and slid further during the outage, and particularly on Tuesday when the cause of the outage was confirmed.

Beyond impacting Dish's bottom line, the outage also reportedly wreaked havoc inside the company. According to The Verge, on Friday many employees said they had not worked in more than a day because the company's internal systems were out.

Employees told The Verge they received very limited information about the outage, but were told not to worry about the inability to contact IT or connect to the virtual private network, commonly called a VPN, used by the company.

On Tuesday, The Verge reported that employees were under the impression they would be expected to work overtime to address the backlog of support issues that would be rolling in.

Adding to Dish's woes, the outages took place around the time the company was set to have a scheduled earnings call, and caused delays in executives accessing numbers and data.

CEO Erik Carlson blamed an "internal outage" when speaking on the call, noting that Dish, Sling, and wireless networks still worked.

In last week's earnings call, Dish reported 9.75 million TV subscribers split between its satellite operations and streaming provider Sling TV, according to Deadline. The company also reported just under 8 million subscribers to its wireless phone service.