Facebook Downtime Had Nothing To Do With Anonymous

Yesterday we talked about downtime at a Facebook that was originally thought to be the result of hackers. The rumor that Facebook was down due to hackers attacking their DNS servers stemmed from a twitter account called Anonymous Own3r the tweeted "I'm attacking Facebook rigth now." Facebook later admitted that the downtime and nothing to do with hackers.

Facebook noted that it experienced outages across parts of Europe affecting an undisclosed number of users. The outage lasted only an hour according to Facebook. A Facebook spokesman said that the downtime was the result of changes made by Facebook to its DNS servers.

The spokesman says that Facebook was running some traffic optimization tests to determine which of its data centers to route certain users to. Facebook issued an official statement that said the change in its DNS servers resulted in some users being temporarily misrouted. The social network says that it detected and resolved the issue immediately, but a small number of users in Western Europe had issues accessing the site while the DNS information repopulated.

The outages occurred during midday Pacific Standard Time and Facebook claims that everything is running properly today. Facebook wasn't specific in which Western European countries experienced outages. There were users from Sweden, Denmark, Ireland, Norway, and Portugal reporting issues online.

[via CNET]