Cyberattack and ‘Security Breach’ Cited on Day Two –

Staff Report –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — What will poor people do who have become totally dependent on social media accounts when the accounts go down and don’t work?

Maybe get outside and go for a hike?

Millions of people were locked out of their Meta accounts for hours on Tuesday when something knocked out Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Threads. This occurred on Super Tuesday, no less, when millions of people are going to the polls to vote in primary elections around the country.

As many as 500,000 Facebook users had reported issues logging in or accessing their pages as of mid-morning Eastern Time on Tuesday, according to outage tracker Downdetector. The number was likely higher.

Many users found they had been logged out of their Facebook accounts, including me. Others got notifications on Instagram that “something went wrong” and their feeds could not be loaded.

Threads, Meta’s competitor to Elon Musk’s Twitter(X), also went down and showed users a popup that said “Something went wrong, please try again later” in place of their feed.

About an hour and a half after the outage reports started ticking up, fewer than 80,000 people were reporting issues with Facebook, according to Downdetector. Reports about Instagram and Messenger had also dropped sharply, probably because people walked away and stopped trying.

Downdetector is a measure of only the users who report issues, so the real number of affected users is likely much higher.

Meta’s status page on Tuesday showed “major disruptions” impacting Facebook login, as well as some other areas of the platform.

Meta has not commented on the reason for Tuesday’s outage, except to say this: “We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on X.

Major platform outages happen relatively infrequently but are typically the result of something benign, such as an issue with a software update, companies tend to claim, although cyber attacks are widespread these days from Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and some parts of Africa.

Some trolls seem to like arguing about this on the platforms once they come back up. My policy is I do not argue with trolls on social media platforms. Some people seem to want to deny the outages had anything to do with hacking. They way I see it, it’s all hacking, one way or another. Do you know the name of the main road leading to Meta’s campus in California? One Hacker Way. It’s all a hack.

My accounts were not restored until I posted this story and shared it on Twitter(X). I created a new email address and got a new access code and was able to login first on the iPhone, then on the website.

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp went down for nearly six hours in 2021, an outage that the company claimed was not due to malicious activity, although no proof was ever offered.

Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg has made many enemies around the world. Meta just announced they would no longer subsidize Rupert Murdoch’s media outlets in Australia, for starters. The company has laid off a third of its hacker/programmer work force, leaving the bots to write their own code. The company appears desperate to get out of the political news business, hiding news posts and posts related to politics with the algorithm.

Service outages are fresh on many consumers’ minds after AT&T experienced a nearly 12-hour network outage late last month that left many customers temporarily unable to place calls, send texts or access the internet from their mobile devices.

Add One

According to the New York Times, which finally wrote about the outage, Meta said it had resolved a technical issue with its platforms, including Facebook, Facebook Messenger and Instagram, after what appeared to be an hourslong outage on Tuesday.

After user reports of an outage that lasted about two hours, Meta said it had fixed the issue that caused the sites to go down.

“We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience,” Andy Stone, a spokesman for Meta, wrote on X.

The issue appeared to be resolved for many users on Tuesday afternoon, but some still reported having trouble with the platforms.

Around 10 a.m. on Tuesday, more than 25,000 users in the United States reported that they were having issues with Facebook, according to Down Detector, a website that tracks user reports of telecommunication and internet disruptions, compared to a base line of 17 such reports on an average day.

By around 10:20 a.m., that number was up to more than 538,000 reports of trouble with the website. Around 76 percent of the complaints were about logging in to the website; 17 percent of the problems reported were with the app and 8 percent with the website.

More than 91,000 people reported issues with Instagram around 10:30 a.m. and 62 percent of the problems reported had to do with the app, while 27 percent of reports were about the feed. More than 13,600 users reported issues with Facebook Messenger around that time, according to Down Detector and 61 percent of those users reported problems with logging in while 24 percent had issues with the app and 14 percent with sending messages.

Users also reported problems with Threads and WhatsApp, which are also owned by Meta.

The outages appeared to affect users globally, with problems reported in the United Kingdom, Germany, Argentina, Japan and elsewhere.

Meta hosts more than 3.98 billion users across its apps each month, the company reported last month.

Some users flocked to X to see if others were also experiencing trouble with those sites. One user told people not to panic if they were having trouble logging in. Many users wondered on X whether they had been hacked, and attempted to change their passwords several times to gain access to their accounts to no avail.

The outage comes ahead of a deadline on Wednesday for Meta and other tech giants, including Apple and Google, to comply with the Digital Markets Act, a new European Union law that aims to increase competition in the digital economy. The law requires the companies to overhaul how some of their products work so that smaller competitors can access their users.

Elon Musk, the billionaire who bought Twitter for $44 billion, appeared to welcome the users to his platform, posting on X a screen shot of Mr. Stone’s statement alongside an image of three penguins from the movie “Madagascar,” labeled with each of Meta’s brands. The penguins saluted another penguin labeled with the X brand.

Add Two

Evidence comes in showing a data breach and cyber attack caused the Meta outages on Tuesday.

Meta hints security breach behind recent outage

Hundreds of thousands of Meta users were impacted by a global service outage on March 5th. Several company representatives, such as Meta’s spokesperson Andy Stone, pointed to a “technical issue” behind the disruption.

However, after noticing the outage, we contacted Meta, with an official company press core hinting that the cause may have been related to security issues.

“We’re working on it. There was a breach of security earlier. Please visit our status page for updates,” Meta replied to the Cybernews query.

We have reached out to Meta for further clarification about the nature of the “breach of security.”

After news about the Meta outage broke, several attacker groups claimed responsibility for the disruption. According to cybersecurity firm Cyberint, three well-known hacktivist groups said they were behind the attack, namely, Skynet, Godzilla, and Anonymous Sudan.

The same groups took credit after OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its API faced “periodic outages.” The company later revealed that the disruption may have resulted from a cyberattack, as an “abnormal traffic pattern reflective of a DDoS attack” was registered.

However, attackers often take credit for service disruptions they had nothing to do with in order to inflate their perceived importance and capabilities.

Facebook and Instagram users could not access the social media platforms with the service logging many of them out. Using correct credentials prompted many users with an “incorrect password” message, sparking fears of a hacking event.

As the outage began, those using the service were kicked out of the platform. The issue impacted desktop and mobile users alike. The blackout hit over 550,000 users on Facebook and over 90,000 on Instagram worldwide, according to the website monitoring platform Downdetector.com.

In late 2021, Facebook went down for six hours after its Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routes were withdrawn from the internet. BGP works like a railroad switchman, deciding what tracks data packs should use to travel.

Add Three

Cyber Safety Tips from the FBI

Internet-enabled crimes and cyber intrusions are becoming increasingly sophisticated and preventing them requires each user of a connected device to be aware and on guard.

1. Keep systems and software up to date and install a strong, reputable anti-virus program.

2. Be careful when connecting to a public Wi-Fi network and do not conduct any sensitive transactions, including purchases, when on a public network.

3. Create a strong and unique passphrase for each online account.

4. Set up multi-factor authentication on all accounts that allow it.
Examine the email address in all correspondence and scrutinize website URLs before responding to a message or visiting a site

5. Don’t click on anything in unsolicited emails or text messages.

6. Be cautious about the information you share in online profiles and social media accounts. Sharing things like pet names, schools, and family members can give scammers the hints they need to guess your passwords or the answers to your account security questions.

7. Don’t send payments to unknown people or organizations that are seeking monetary support and urge immediate action.

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