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The story
On the 7th, the websites of Ibaraki Prefecture and the Ibaraki Prefectural Police became inaccessible. According to the prefecture, the issue is believed to stem from a malfunction on the servers of SoftBank, which handles website management under contract, and the company is investigating the cause, though no timeline for restoration has been set. On 5ch, threads exploded with reactions ranging from shock that a public institution would use SoftBank in the first place, to criticism of the industry practice of spreading telecom contracts across multiple carriers, to posted images claiming the server’s admin panel had been tampered with — fueling speculation over whether this was a simple outage or something more like an attack.
Ibaraki Prefecture and Police Headquarters Websites Inaccessible — Possible Malfunction on SoftBank Server – Sankei News
2026/10/7 14:10
Ibaraki Prefecture announced on the 7th that a failure had occurred making the websites of the prefecture and prefectural police headquarters inaccessible. No timeline for restoration has been set. The cause is believed to be a malfunction on the server of SoftBank, which manages the websites, and the company is investigating.
Source: sankei.com / Original article here
What people said
Surprising for a government office to do this.
There's nothing in it but cost savings…
Did someone skim money off the top? (nakanuki — slang for a middleman pocketing a cut)
Makes you wonder what the prefectural police are even doing.
Digital Agency: 'We… have nothing to say.'
Sorry… SoftBank was the only carrier that would still sign me up even with bad credit…
There's a thing called 'share-wari' that works like collusion, pressuring agencies into spreading their spending evenly across all three major carriers.
If you say you just want to stick with NTT (Docomo), they push back because of this collusion.
Rakuten's probably joining in on this collusion too, or already has.
This is really something the Fair Trade Commission should be looking into.
And since it's the bad guys wielding that AI, there's no defending against it.
That's really what it comes down to.
It's not the good guys using AI, it's the bad guys using AI.
So there's nothing to be done about it.
I think going back to paper is the best option.
Twenty years ago everything was paper, so it's entirely doable.
For anything online, just keep it limited to PR announcements.
Nah, 'Baldy' (SoftBank) leaks stuff on its own before anyone even has to attack it…
If you're going to deface it with something like 'Your cloud is ours,' you might as well go with the classic 'All your base are belong to us' lol
Is this basically a list of companies and organizations whose lack of security awareness — still using SoftBank in this day and age — is proving fatal?
Can't connect to Naxos…
Well, there's basically zero defense.
Apparently the hackers and crackers themselves are stunned at how completely undefended everything is lol
That company leaks stuff on its own even without being attacked lol
And it's not just leaks — their subsidiary FirstServer actually lost customer data outright too, remember?
Stop using LINE already!
And Amazon too!
Personally I use +Message instead of the former, and Rakuten instead of the latter.
Are you an au shill?
Well, it's the prefecture that's home to Lake Kasumigaura, after all.
Did Anonymous go and mix up Kasumigaura with Kasumigaseki (Tokyo's government district) aga-a-a-ain?
Background and Key Points of This Topic
It’s standard practice for Ibaraki Prefecture and its police headquarters to outsource website management to an external server provider, and in this case the prefecture has stated the cause was a malfunction on the server operated by SoftBank, which handles that management. At the time of Sankei’s report, this was described only as a “malfunction” — no official announcement has confirmed a cyberattack. Images claiming the admin panel had been altered were posted in the thread, but no verifiable source or information about who took them was provided, so their authenticity can’t be confirmed. There was also talk of “share-wari,” an industry practice of spreading government telecom contracts across multiple carriers, but this is a general observation about procurement practices, and no evidence was presented directly tying it to this particular incident. SoftBank has a track record of past incidents, including customer data leaks and outages at its subsidiaries, and much of the thread’s reaction reflects distrust built up from that history — worth noting this isn’t information that actually pins down the cause of this specific incident.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Speed+) thread “Ibaraki Prefecture and Police Headquarters Websites Inaccessible — Possible Malfunction on SoftBank Server.”
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