Hundreds of thousands of Deutsche Telekom customers in Germany were hit on Sunday by network outages and a company executive blamed the disruptions on a failed hacking attempt to hijack consumer router devices for a wider internet attack.

Deutsche Telekom said as many as 900,000, or about 4.5 percent of its 20 million fixed-line customers, suffered internet outages starting on Sunday and continuing into Monday, when the number of affected users began to decline sharply. Deutsche Telekom's head of IT Security told that the outages appeared to be tied to a botched attempt to turn a sizeable number of customers' routers into a part of the Mirai botnet.

US and UK intelligence services have secret access points for German telecom companies’ internal networks, Der Spiegel reports, citing slides created in the NSA’s Treasure Map program used to get near-real-time visualization of the global internet.

The latest scandal continues to evolve around the US’ NSA and the British GCHQ, both of which appear to be able to eavesdrop on German giants such as Deutsche Telekom, Netcologne, Stellar, Cetel and IABG network operators, according to Der Spiegel’s report based on material disclosed by Edward Snowden.