facebook outage
Yup, so of course the social media addicts head on over to Facebook, which is experiencing outages of its own, although fortunately less frequent ones. [1]
Facebook is currently suffering from a power outage at its Palo Alto home office, and the outage appears to be linked to a small but fatal plane crash that occurred earlier this morning in East Palo Alto. [2]
The outage silenced.05 percent of Facebook users, or 150,000 people, which may not seem like that many, considering that Facebook now has over 300 million users. [3]
The theories behind who and what attacked Twitter and Facebook yesterday — causing intermittent outages at each — are flying like so many tweets across the Internet. [...] In short: the outage at Twitter (and to a lesser extent Facebook & LiveJournal) was due to an effort to silence an anti-Russian blogger from Tbilisi who has been calling attention to a recent resurgence of tensions in the region. [4]
For the past week and a half, several thousand Facebook users were unable to access their accounts because of a technical issue with a server. [3]
One of the top 10 blogs worldwide, Mashable is a hub for those looking to make sense of the online realm. [1]
CNet cites Facebook’s Chief Security Officer Max Kelly saying that a political blogger using the online name “Cyxymu” - who had accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and Google’s Blogger and YouTube — was the target of a denial of service attack, and that the attack against him was what caused the outages. [...] This is a type of reputation attack in which a large volume of spam is sent out designed to look like it came from someone else, with the intention of incurring anger against that person by the recipients of the spam, or causing the apparent sender’s account to be suspended for allegedly sending spam. [4]
Mashable is an online guide to social media. [1]
That this server failure wasn’t widely reported is also distressing. [...] According to CNET, affected users also received this message: “You may not have been able to access your account over the last several days. [...] In order to be cautious, we defaulted some of your privacy settings to their most restrictive settings. [3]
Jobs Premier Farnell is a leading multi-channel, high service electronics distributor supporting millions of engineers and purchasing professionals across the Americas. [1]
Paranoid thoughts, perhaps, but as Facebook grows and becomes more integrated with ordinary people’s lives and with businesses and corporations, the security of the site becomes a public matter of great importance. [3]
Sources:
[1] Facebook Down. Twitter Down. Social Media Meltdown.
[2] Palo Alto Plane Crash Takes Out Power at Facebook
[3] Facebook Outage Silences 150,000 Users - PC World
[4] Security Fix - Russia-Georgia Conflict Blamed for Twitter …