The Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) Observatory in Chile suspended all astronomical observation operations and disabled its public website after a cyberattack on Saturday, October 29, 2022. Email services at the Observatory are currently down and IT professionals are working to restore the affected systems. The organization, which announced the security incident to the public on Twitter yesterday, noted that due to the nature of the incident, it is not possible to set a date for the return to normal operations at the moment.

The observatory also clarified that the attack did not compromise ALMA’s antennas or any science data and showed no signs of data tampering or theft. BleepingComputer contacted ALMA to learn more about the security incident, and a spokesperson commented:

“As the investigation is ongoing, we cannot discuss the details further. Despite the lack of perfect protection against hackers, our IT team was ready to face the situation and had the appropriate infrastructure. We are still working hard to fully restore services. Thank you for your understanding”, ALMA Observatory.

The ALMA observatory consists of 66 high precision 12 m diameter radio telescopes arranged in two arrays located at an altitude of 5,000 m (16,400 ft) above the Chakhnantor Plateau. The project cost $1.4 billion, making it the world’s most expensive ground-based telescope, and was developed by a multinational effort involving the United States, Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Chile.

Since starting normal operation in 2013, ALMA has assisted in pioneering work on comet and planet formation, participated in the Event Horizon project to photograph a black hole for the first time in history, and discovered the biomarker phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus. The observatory is used by scientists from the National Science Foundation, the European Southern Observatory, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, and other groups from around the world, so any shutdown will affect numerous scientific teams and ongoing projects.