Anonymous may have been responsible for the Facebook outage Thursday night and Friday morning. Facebook suffered sporadic outages across the globe Thursday evening that still lingered until just after 9 a.m. EST Friday morning. Currently there’s speculation that Anonymous was behind the outage, based on a “tango down” message on Twitter that appeared on the YourAnonNews account last night at 9 p.m.
But then earlier this afternoon, Anonymous denied any such attack. “Anonymous would never attack Facebook, we have said this many times. Why would we attack a tool that many anons use to spread info?” the hacktivist group states.
Meanwhile, Facebook is keeping quiet as to what happened, and instead offers a generic apology with minimal details. “Some users briefly experienced issues loading the site,” Facebook said in an e-mail statement about the outage. “The issues have since been resolved and everyone should now have access to Facebook. We apologize for any inconvenience.”
Despite the most recent Anonymous message, the hacktivist group has threatened to take down Facebook several times in the past. One of the most recent is the threat made back in August 2011 that promised to “kill Facebook” on November 5. Anonymous eventually shelved the attack, allowing Facebook users to continue “liking” and uploading pics of their favorite dancing pet as usual.
PC Advisor reports that packets tracked by just-ping.com were being lost Friday morning at Facebook locations in Stockholm, Shanghai, Copenhagen, Oslo, and Lisbon. Checkpoints were unavailable in San Francisco and Moscow; and an unknown host message was generated in Beijing.
While the outage may not be related to Anonymous prime, there’s a good chance a rogue member tried to take the social network down in a solo attempt. Last month a lone gunman took down The Pirate Bay for over 24 hours using a DDoS attack. Wikileaks also suffered a DDoS at the same time, but the duration was much longer.
Source: Toms Guide