If you recall, Facebook went down for a lot of Europe yesterday afternoon. Everybody’s “favorite” Anonymous troll began taking credit even though it was obvious that he was just taking advantage of the situation. The most telling evidence was when he began asking the BBC to change a story about Facebook downtime from six months ago. That still leaves open the question of what exactly caused the downtime.
Facebook tells us that the downtime experienced across Europe was caused by a DNS change that was part of a “traffic optimization test.” It was obvious already, but Facebook once again confirmed that this was not a hack. Here’s the full statement:
“Earlier today we made a change to DNS as part of a traffic optimization test, and that change resulted in some users being temporarily mis-routed. We detected and resolved the issue immediately, but a small number of users located primarily in Western Europe experienced issues accessing the site while the DNS addresses repopulated. We are now back to 100 percent, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
These things happen, but it’s usually not noticed by most of the world. Of course, any small change in Facebook will be detected thanks to the social networks recent climb to one billion active users worldwide. Combine that with so-called Anonymous members seeking attention on Twitter, and you have a populace that begins spreading rumors and falsehoods.
If Facebook or any other major service like GoDaddy is down, don’t believe the words of somebody claiming to be from Anonymous. There’s only a few trustworthy Anonymous feeds on Twitter, and Anonymous Own3r is not one of them. He has proven twice now that he’s just seeking attention. It’s in our, and your, best interest to ignore any further claims coming from any Anonymous feed that’s not been verified.
