Millions of Poles received a Friday-morning emergency alert from the Government Security Centre with a link to a safety manual – and then many found the official website refusing to open. The minister in charge of digitalisation said the problem was overwhelming public interest, not a cyberattack.
The text message, sent by RCB, included the phrase „badz przygotowany” in its original spelling and directed readers to „Poradnik bezpieczeństwa”. As of around 10:50 a.m. on Friday, July 31, the linked page was still loading with difficulty.
The alert followed a tense incident in Polish airspace. On Thursday, July 30 at about 3:40 a.m., an unidentified object was detected near Poland. An F-16 fighter was scrambled to identify and intercept it, but the object vanished from radar at about 3:46 a.m. The Operational Command of the Armed Forces said the wreckage was found near the village of Tarnawa-Kolonia; investigators later confirmed it was a Russian Ch-101 missile containing a significant amount of explosives.
Why the government’s website stalled
Krzysztof Gawkowski, deputy prime minister and minister of digitalisation, told a press conference on Friday that there had been no attack and no failure. He blamed the outage on exceptionally heavy network traffic generated by people trying to reach the safety guide.
His statement was intended to rule out a distributed denial-of-service attack, a type of cyberattack that can also make websites temporarily unavailable. The government guide was working, he said, but the sheer number of requests was enough to slow down pages in the gov.pl domain.
A system that reaches many, but not everyone
The communication chaos had already become a public issue before Friday. Residents of municipalities near the missile’s crash site did not receive an RCB text message after the incident, leaving them uncertain about what had happened. RCB announced it would review its procedures and draw lessons from the situation.
Industry observers, including the security portal ZaufanaTrzeciaStrona, warned that an official alert containing a clickable link could encourage people to treat links in SMS messages as safe. Cybersecurity specialists have long cautioned against opening links from text messages because of the risk of phishing, where criminals try to steal data or money.
Gawkowski also said that an alert module would be added to the mObywatel app, but he admitted it would not solve the problem of reaching every Pole in a crisis. Only about 12 million people use the app, whereas Friday’s RCB alert was delivered to 30 million. The scale of that SMS distribution was itself the reason government websites struggled to cope.
– We do not have any attack, any failure. The RCB guide is working, but we have huge network traffic on government websites, caused by great interest, and that causes overload and can result in longer page loading time – Gawkowski explained.
– I already encourage you to use the „Safety Guide” in the mObywatel app. The fact that there is such great interest in reading it is very good – the politician assessed.
Source: WNP.PL, Photo: PAP
