Spam attack shut downs Marshall Islands email service

Marshall Islands National Telecommunications Authority is reporting that a sustained spamming attack during the past 24 hours managed to cause a successful Denial of Service attack on the email services of the islands only Internet Service Provider. More info on the attack :

More than 18 hours after the initial attack Tuesday incoming email service to the monopoly provider had still not been restored. The government-owned National Telecommunications Authority (NTA) was hit with a sudden four-fold increase in incoming email, which it described as an attack by "zombie computers", said an NTA spokesman. While NTA customers could send and receive emails to each other through the local system, virtually no non-NTA emails had been received since Monday, impacting local businesses, banks and government offices.

Is this coordinated spamming attack is someone's way to ruin the monopoly of the islands' only Internet Service Provider by emphasizing on how centralization and monopoly is a disadvantage to the final customer, or is it a sudden peak of bandwidth wasting image spam as usual? It surely demonstrates that a single ISP per country, no matter if it's a third world country or a popular tourist destination, make the whole country's Internet infrastructure easier to shut down and censor. Take Zimbabwe and Burma for instance.