Kremlin-affiliated hackers Anonymous Sudan, with two lesser-known groups, Skynet and Godzilla, have claimed responsibility for the downing of Facebook, Instagram and Threads. The massive outage appears to have been localized to Meta’s authentication servers.

If indeed it was a targeted DDoS, Zuck&Co. need to beef up a weak point, pronto. In today’s SB Blogwatch, we can’t help notice yesterday’s date.

Your humble blogwatcher curated these bloggy bits for your entertainment. Not to mention: Radiohead (vegetarian edition).

“People are suspicious”
The troubles seem to have started at some point after 10 a.m. ET on Tuesday. … When loading the apps or websites, users receive an error message that “something went wrong” and to try again later, or, in the case of Facebook, they’re taken to a logged-out landing page but are unable to sign in.
…
It’s highly unusual for Meta to be experiencing a widespread outage like this, given the size and scale of its network and the redundancies built in. For that reason, some people are suspicious about the origins of this outage. [It] comes at a terrible time for any candidates or political organizations looking to do last-minute voter outreach efforts or those reminding people to go vote … in the primary on what’s known as Super Tuesday.

“Major attack”
3 threat actor groups (Skynet, Godzilla, and Anonymous Sudan) have claimed to attack and shut down Facebook, Threads and Instagram. … The fact that it is 3 groups collaborating together … makes it appear that this actually could be a real claim.
…
These 3 groups have collaborated before. In December 2023 [we] detected the three threat actor groups claiming responsibility for disrupting the Discord login page. They have also collaborated on various other projects together including an attack on ChatGPT.
…
But … it is quite possible it could be a bluff. … Anonymous Sudan did not notify about the attack in advance, which they often do when undertaking such a major attack, so the group may be bluffing. … As of now there is no proof.

“Breach of security”
We contacted Meta, with an official … hinting that the cause may have been related to security issues: “We’re working on it. There was a breach of security earlier,” … Meta replied.
…
Attackers often take credit for service disruptions they had nothing to do with in order to inflate their perceived importance and capabilities. … We have reached out to Meta for further clarification about the nature of the “breach of security.”

I’ve got a tenner on DNS. And on “super Tuesday,” too — where’s my tin foil hat?

Looks like somebody is going to get called in to be grilled by a bunch of politicians who want to post snippets of them reaming a CEO.

I have a different perspective. While I agree that for many, Facebook is time-wasting fluff, many of us use it for business.

I make machines for glasswork and use Facebook to keep in contact with the glassworking community. I show my products and projects and see what glassworkers are making.

I wish there was another alternative [for] connecting people who share a common interest, without pushing stoopid pop culture and targeted ads, but at the moment, Facebook is the only tool I have. And yes, I have looked at alternatives like Mastadon: They are ghost towns.

We have a small livestock operation, and won an online auction late last night for a pig about four hours away. Facebook was the only listed means of contacting the person, and we were planning on driving to pick it up this morning.

Now I get to re-arrange my day today to deal with that, and will probably have to take a PTO day from work to drive there later in the week. Real businesses are … impacted by Facebook being down — including those … you might never expect.

It’s a good attempt, but Facebook falling over will never be funnier than when their authentication went down globally and they used that to identify their engineers: … Nobody could log in to fix it or access any of their data centres because that was also tied to their Facebook ID.

Taking angle grinders to their own facilities was such a funny thing for them to have to do.

Has a meta developer used ChatGPT again?

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