Here’s the reason why Facebook was down
Earlier today Facebook and Instagram went dark, and many social network users were forced to talk to other people face to face to show them what they ate that day. While it’s not yet clear why both sites went down, someone is claiming that the outage was caused by a massive DDoS attack on the company’s servers.
Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, AIM, Hipchat #offline #LizardSquad
— Lizard Squad (@LizardMafia) January 27, 2015
That someone is Lizard Squad, a black hat hacking group that has claimed responsibility for a bunch of other DDoS attacks, including two DDoS attacks on Sony’s Playstation Network last year, with the latest one happening during the holidays.
Everyone really wanted to know why you couldn’t upload and filter your selfies huh. https://t.co/fIJmWgBMRM pic.twitter.com/IpovGHiWSd
— Avinash Kunnath (@avinashkunnath) January 27, 2015
Their claims is somewhat substantiated by Norse, a site that tracks DDoS attacks around the world.
Facebook has not said anything official about the source of the downtime.
EDIT: Facebook has denied that Lizard Squad or anybody else caused the outage today – a Facebook official said that the fault was caused by the company while they were rolling out a change in the system, according to the BBC.
“Earlier this evening many people had trouble accessing Facebook and Instagram. This was not the result of a third-party attack but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems. We moved quickly to fix the problem, and both services are back to 100% for everyone.”
