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Tens of thousands of people across the globe were logged out of their Facebook and Instagram accounts overnight due to a technical issue that led to an outage in Meta’s social media platforms, sparking concerns of a cyber attack.
Users in the US, India, Europe, Australia and more were unable to access their Facebook and Instagram pages due to what Meta is calling a “technical issue”, which logged them out and told them their password was incorrect.
According to DownDetector, the outage reached a peak at 3am this morning (6 March), with Cyber Daily observing 612,946 Facebook outage reports in the US alone, while Instagram had 97,798. In Australia, outages reached 24,244 for Facebook and 5,786 for Instagram.
Users seeing a message that their credentials were incorrect ignited fears that the platform had suffered a cyber attack, with users taking to alternative social media platforms like X in search of answers.
🚨#FacebookDown: Mark Zuckerberg Meta, IG & FB Down! Meanwhile Everyone coming here on X to check if #FacebookOutage are down, Is it a #CyberAttack? pic.twitter.com/VpXXTg9946
— Sociat USA 🇺🇸 (@SociatUSA) March 5, 2024
However, Meta has since reported the service is back online via its Facebook X account, and user credentials are now allowing them to login.
And we’re back 💙 So sorry for those who were unable to access Facebook earlier today.
— Facebook (@facebook) March 5, 2024
Despite this, several users are still reporting issues in the comments of Facebook’s post.
Services returning to somewhat normal has not completely thwarted cyber attack concerns, with some still worried that the incident could be a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
As seen by cyber intelligence firm CyberInt, the outage has also been claimed by a trio of threat actors working in tandem – SkyNet, Godzilla, and Anonymous Sudan.
The latter posted a DownDetector screenshot to its Telegram, claiming that the outage was the work of the three groups.
“Facebook downed by Skynet/Godzilla/InfraShutDown,” it wrote, with the third name referring to its brand new DDoS-as-a-service operation, which the group is pushing and advertising heavily on Telegram.
However, the posts show no actual proof that a cyber attack was the cause of the outage.
Additionally, researchers at @vxunderground on X have addressed the concerns, saying they assume it is purely a DNS fault.
There are rumors of a DDoS attack against social media giant Meta (formerly Facebook). We don’t know if it’s true. However, as is tradition, we just assume it to be a DNS issue.
— vx-underground (@vxunderground) March 5, 2024
Cheers
Meta has yet to address the cyber attack concerns. Cyber Daily will provide an update as the story develops.
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