The global outage at several Meta services, may have been caused by a cyber attack. When the outage was fixed, several hacker groups claimed responsibility for it. At least one Meta spokesman confirmed that it may have been a security incident.
So reports Cybernews.com, which had contacted the tech site (1).
It probably didn't escape your notice that on Tuesday Facebook, Facebook Messenger and Instagram were down for several hours. Users were automatically logged out and unable to log in with their passwords. On Allestoringen.nl, nearly 70,000 Dutch people reported the Facebook outage at its peak. On Instagram, the number was about 30,000. At the international variant Downdetector.com, it was over 575,000 and 90,000 people, respectively.
Meta initially said that the outage was the result of a "technical problem," including to RTL News (2). But what caused the "technical problem"? The editors of Cybernews.com decided to inquire with the American technology company. A spokesperson wrote the following:
"We are working on it. There was a security breach earlier. Please visit our status page for updates." The editors asked for more clarity on this statement. No response has been received as of yet.
After news of the global outage at Meta went viral, several hacker groups claimed responsibility. Cyber security firm Cyberint says (3) three so-called threat actors are involved: Skynet, Godzilla and Anonymous Sudan. Security researchers say at the same time that so far there is no evidence of a cyber attack. "Possibly it is bluff," Cyberint said.
The same hacker groups said in December 2023 that they had taken down Discord's login page. They also allegedly worked together to carry out an attack on ChatGPT. OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, later revealed that the outage may have been the result of a cyber attack: in fact, IT staff saw an "abnormal traffic pattern indicative of a DDoS attack."
It would not be the first time hackers took credit for an attack they had absolutely nothing to do with. In late 2021, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were also down for several hours. Some suggested this was due to a bug in updating the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which meant data packets didn't know which way to go to get to users. The other said it was "the most sophisticated and coordinated hack of all time."
Finally, Facebook came up with the redeeming word. A router that controls network traffic between data centers caused the outage. A configuration error was most likely the culprit. There was no evidence of a cyber attack, or that user data had ended up in the wrong hands.
(1) https://cybernews.com/news/security-breach-behind-facebook-outage/
(2) https://www.rtlnieuws.nl/nieuws/nederland/artikel/5438482/storing-bij-facebook-en-instagram
(3) https://cyberint.com/blog/other/meta-is-down-skynet-claims-to-have-attacked/
