Anonymous not responsible for European Facebook outage, despite claims to the contrary

So Facebook was down across parts of Europe for a while on Thursday.

What exactly are people supposed to do if Facebook is down?

Work?  Sleep?  Interact IRL?

They Tweet about Facebook being down, as notorious hacker Anonymous did – doing everything to lead the Twitterverse to believe they were responsible except for specifically claiming responsibility.

Anonymous sent a number of Tweets while countries including Italy, France, Norway and Denmark were Face-less, taunting Facebook over the outage, and even claiming to have ownership and control of over half of all worldwide cyber servers.

Facebook was quick to deny they had been hacked, instead putting the outage down to a DNS issue.

In an email to VentureBeat, Facebook said they had investigated Anonymous’ hacking claims, and they were simply not true.  Facebook’s automated vulnerability scanners found no evidence of Anonymous’ claimed hack, and referred to DNS changes earlier in the day as part of a traffic-optimisation test, as being responsible for users in some (predominantly Western) European countries being incorrectly mis-routed for a period of time.

The email went on to explain how Facebook is watching and preparing for Anonymous and other hackers all day, every day, and as such they have extensive protocols, systems and procedures in place to protect their network of users and their personal information.

The service was back up by the end of the day, with Facebook apologising for any inconvenience and assuring users the network was back to 100% functionality, and all of their details were completely secure.

Facebook on European outage: DNS issue, not Anonymous hack

In other news….

Source: http://socialitemedia.com.au/anonymous-responsible-european-facebook-outage-claims-contrary/2195/

Written by

Tenille Bentley is the founder of Socialite Media and The Global Good Foundation. Tenille has won the top 30 under 30 Australian Leading Entrepreneurs of the Year for her work with the Global Good Foundation (GGF) and was awarded State Finalist in the Telstra Business Woman of the Year , she appears in the national publication Who’s Who of Australian Women.

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