Facebook: Oi, Lizard Squad – we can take down our own site, ta A technical messup – rather than hostile hacker action – is apparently the reason Facebook, Instagram and other Web 2.0 sweethearts fell off the internet on Monday. Hacking crew Lizard Squad was gloating over the downtime; Tinder also disappeared for a while during the outage of Facebook and its photo-sharing sister site Instagram. Security experts were unconvinced it was caused by a distributed denial-of-service assault. Facebook also dismissed any suggestion it was DDoSed; its techies blame technical problem for the hour-long outage: Quote from FB at the down time: Spoiler Facebook and Instagram experienced a major outage tonight from 22:10 until 23:10 PST. Our engineers identified the cause of the outage and recovered the site quickly. You should now see decreasing error rates while our systems stabilize. We don't expect any other break in service. I'll post another update within 30 mins. Thank you for your patience. It's understood a dodgy configuration change was pushed to Facebook's API servers, which caused them to fall over. The recent outage of Facebook and the subsequent speculation that it may be a cyber-attack demonstrates the difficulty in reporting cyber-attacks," Professor Woodward said. "Facebook has confirmed that the downtime was caused by an engineering mistake. However, the Lizard Squad had only to mention the problem on Twitter and it caused instant speculation that it was they who had caused the problem. In the same way that it is very difficult for law enforcement agencies to attribute blame for cyber-attacks, it is very easy for hacking groups to plausibly claim any significant online incident as their work," he added. Source, Googlenews
