Well, well, it appears the global outage that knocked Facebook and Instagram users off the platforms yesterday may have been more than just a “technical issue” after all.
Despite Meta initially brushing it off as a routine glitch, the company is now suggesting there was actually some kind of security breach that caused the widespread logouts and disruptions.
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Meta Suggests Security Breach Behind Facebook and Instagram Outage
“We’re working on it. There was a breach of security earlier,” Meta told media outlets like CyberNews, backtracking on the generic “technical issue” explanation from the day before.
Uh oh, that doesn’t sound good. As of now, Meta hasn’t provided any juicy details about what this potential “breach” entailed or how severe it may have been. And you can bet they’ll probably stay tight-lipped to avoid tipping their hand while investigating.
Still, the mere mention of a security breach is raising eyebrows and has various threat groups crawling out of the woodwork to claim responsibility for taking Meta’s services down, whether it’s true or not.
A few hacktivist collectives like SkyNet, Godzilla, and even Anonymous Sudan have gone as far as to post screenshots allegedly showing they coordinated a massive DDoS attack to overwhelm Facebook’s systems.
One of the groups is supposedly pushing a new “DDoS-as-a-service” offering on Telegram and may have used the outage as a way to advertise their disruptive capabilities, whether they were actually involved or not.
Of course, none of these claims are verified at this point. Meta could very well still be dealing with an internal issue or a more sophisticated, quieter cyber attack from different actors entirely.
But the revelation that it may have been more than just a routine tech fail is definitely raising security concerns. If there was indeed a breach, you can bet Facebook’s parent company is scrambling to get to the bottom of it.
The last thing they’d want is for bad actors to have penetrated their systems, accessed sensitive data, or opened vulnerabilities that put user accounts and information at risk down the line.
For now though, details are still hazy. Was it an inside job? An external attack? Or perhaps just an unfortunate lapse in security protocols? I guess we’ll have to wait for Meta to provide some clarity, if they ever do. One thing’s for sure – outages like this are never a good look for companies that big tech caliber.
