Security News
Facebook says that yesterday's worldwide outage was caused by faulty configuration changes made to its backbone routers that brought all its services to a halt. "Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication," said Santosh Janardhan, VP for Engineering and Infrastructure at Facebook.
As of Monday afternoon, Facebook had been flat on its face for hours, suffering a simultaneous worldwide outage not only on its main site, but also at its Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Oculus VR subsidiaries. The New York Times reported that Facebook's internal communications platform, Workplace, was also dragged offline, "Leaving most employees unable to do their jobs." It's been a thumb-twiddling afternoon, the Times reported, with two Facebook employees comparing it to a "Snow day."
Users worldwide are reporting that they are unable to access Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, instead seeing errors that the sites can't be reached. When attempting to open any of the three sites, they are given DNS PROBE FINISHED NXDOMAIN errors and advised to check if there is a typo in the domain entered in the address bar.
Twitter is experiencing a worldwide outage affecting their web platform that prompts users to logout and prevents them from accessing tweets. The outage began at around noon EST and only affects the web/desktop version of Twitter, not the mobile platform.
Microsoft is investigating an ongoing Multi-Factor Authentication issue preventing some customers from logging into their Microsoft 365 accounts. "We're investigating an issue with Multi-Factor Authentication that is preventing some users from accessing Microsoft 365 services. Additional information will be provided in the admin center under MO287933, the company tweeted."
Trello is down for many users around the world, second time this week. Trello is a web-based TODO list-style platform owned by Atlassian, makers of Jira and Confluence.
Parts of New Zealand were cut off from the digital world today after a major local ISP was hit by an aggressive DDoS attack. Vocus - the country's third-largest internet operator which is behind brands including Orcon, Slingshot and Stuff Fibre - confirmed the cyberattack originated at one of its customers.
The Boston Public Library has disclosed today that its network was hit by a cyberattack on Wednesday, leading to a system-wide technical outage. It is the third-largest public library in the United States behind the federal Library of Congress and the New York Public Library, based on the total number of items it holds.
Websites were briefly knocked offline Thursday after a software update triggered a glitch at network specialty firm Akamai. Reports of internet outages from locations around the world spiked at website Downdetector, with US-based Akamai saying some websites were offline for as long as an hour.
Akamai is investigating an ongoing outage affecting many major websites and online services, including Steam, the PlayStation Network, Newegg, AWS, Amazon, Google, and Salesforce. While the company has already acknowledged the issue, pinning it on an Edge DNS service problem, Akamai is still trying to find the underlying cause behind the incident.