Meta Claims A Bug Crashed Facebook, Insta and Threads, But Hackers Claim Otherwise

Facebook, Instagram, and other Meta-owned properties went down earlier today and are still suffering from the aftershocks. Reports initially started to surface suggesting that threat actors were behind this and that it was a DDoS attack, but Meta appears to be claiming otherwise. Whether this was a technical issue or an attack on Super Tuesday is still unclear at this point, but evidently, the outage is still affecting many users around the world.

Around 10 am EST, reports started to flood in around the Internet that Facebook and other Meta platforms like Instagram were down. This seemed to peak, according to DownDetector, around 10:30 am EST, at which point there were 511,688 reports of outages for Facebook alone. Over the past several hours, this has tapered off, though some people are still reporting that they cannot log in. Around the same time, curiously, several other platforms, such as YouTube, also saw a spike in outage reports, but those could simply be erroneous or people encountering other issues.


In any event, around the peak of these events, threat actors began to claim responsibility for the outages as attacks that they had perpetrated. CyberInt reports that Skynet, Godzilla, and Anonymous Sudan have claimed in Telegram channels that they have attacked Meta and shut down Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, among others. Some people have also claimed that this fits the bill of these group’s TTPs with a potentially smaller, earlier, test of the attack before the real deal. However, as vxunderground notes, until there is official confirmation one way or the other, we will assume that this was a DNS issue because it is always DNS.

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.

Cheers

— vx-underground (@vxunderground) March 5, 2024

Furthermore, the X account for Meta Quest posted a picture explaining a “technical issue” had led to difficulty in accessing the platform. It is unclear if this was related to the broader outage, but the timing is curious nonetheless. As such, we will wait for official confirmation from Meta before claiming exactly what this was; thus, stay tuned to HotHardware for updates on the developing situation.