The IT infrastructure of Kyivstar, Ukraine’s largest mobile communications provider, was “partially destroyed” by a large-scale hacker attack on Tuesday, the company’s CEO Oleksandr Komarov said on national television, Reuters reports.

“(The attack) significantly damaged the (IT) infrastructure, limited access, we could not resist it on a virtual level, so we closed Kyivstar physically to limit the enemy’s access,” Komarov said.

Earlier, “Kyivstar” announced that it was the victim of a large-scale cyberattack on Tuesday morning, which temporarily disabled mobile communications and the Internet signal.

The company, which is owned by Amsterdam-based mobile operator Veon, said it was working to fix the outage and was cooperating with law enforcement.

Separately, the co-founder of Monobank, a major Ukrainian payment system, announced on social media that his company is currently experiencing a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack, but that everything is “under control.”

The Kyiv correspondents of Reuters experienced interruptions in the work of Kyivstar cellular communication throughout the day on Tuesday.

“The most important thing is that users’ personal data are not compromised,” Kyivstar reported, promising to compensate customers for the loss of access to services.

Kyivstar did not immediately say who it believed was responsible, but Ukrainian authorities and companies have often accused Russia of orchestrating cyberattacks against them in the past.

(Photo of the article: © Ilya Martynov | Dreamstime.com)