Facebook Down In Several Countries, Site Denies Anonymous Involvement
Facebook users in Sweden, Denmark, Ireland, Norway and Portugal and other parts of Europe were unable to access the site yesterday, and it seemed that the situation had been resolved as of Saturday afternoon. While a Twitter user claiming to be part of hacktivist group Anonymous took credit for the disruption of service, Facebook claimed it was an internal issue that made the site unavailable.
The website DownRightNow.com, which tracks the status of Facebook and other websites reports the site’s status as “up” as of 4:20 pm Eastern time, but claims there was a widespread disruption 35 minutes prior.
CBS News reported that various users in Western Europe found Facebook down yesterday, but Facebook told CBS it had nothing to do with any hackers.
“Earlier today we made a change to DNS as part of a traffic optimization test,” a Facebook rep wrote to CBS. “And that change resulted in some users being temporarily mis-routed. We detected and resolved the issue immediately, but a small number of users located primarily in Western Europe experienced issues accessing the site while the DNS addresses repopulated. We are now back to 100 percent, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
Twitter user AnonymousOwn3r tweeted yesterday, “I’m attacking facebook right now.” Socialbarrel.com however reports the same user took credit for disruption of GoDaddy.com in a previous incident, while GoDaddy reported its problems were internal as well.
By most accounts, operations were running smoothly for Facebook accounts in the United States and just in case one statement from Facebook claiming they were not hacked isn’t enough, VentureBeat.com reported this message from someone at the site.
“There has not been a hack of Facebook, we have investigated these claims and they are not valid. The evidence cited was produced by an automated vulnerability scanner that alerts developers of potential vulnerability, and we have found these all to be false alerts. We expect Anonymous just like we expect any other attack on any other day.”
How would you react if you logged on one day to find Facebook down?
