A massive blackout crippled Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp on Monday, October 4. For more than 6 hours, the whole world had to do without these social networks and messaging services. If Facebook
invoked “configuration changes” on “routers” – in short, the technical problem – to explain the failure, the theories on the origins and consequences of this failure were numerous on Twitter.
For you, 20 minutes unraveled the true from the false.
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Chinese hackers Xian Hughjanus and Sun Jisu behind the attack
“LAST MINUTE: Facebook has revealed that the recent outage of its apps and services was caused by a group of Chinese state-backed hackers known as Xian Hughjanus. This message, written in English, quickly made the rounds of Twitter after the announcement of the outage.
The tweets posted by the same user following this first message leave little doubt: it was a hoax. The author even made up a “statement” from a so-called “Chinese spokesperson” that ended with “ohhhhh my ding ding dong”. A declaration which evokes more the singer Gunther than the hushed diplomatic language.
Another message, which is still circulating on Twitter on Tuesday, attributes the origin of the failure to “Sun Jisu”, a young thirteen-year-old Chinese hacker. Reuters is believed to be behind this so-called revelation. Problem: The news agency did not publish any dispatches on this young boy. As for the photo that sometimes accompanies tweets, it shows Wang Zhengyang, who became known in 2014 at the age of twelve by hacking his school’s computer system. Nothing to do, therefore, with the failure of the company with billions of users.
A link between the interview of a whistleblower and the global blackout?
The blackout occurred a few hours after the broadcast on American television of an interview with France Haugen, a whistleblower. A former Facebook employee, she released thousands of documents, which notably led to a US Senate hearing scheduled for Tuesday.
It did not take more for some Internet users to establish a link between the two events. The failure, however, is of technical origin, as detailed by Facebook and several experts.
The bug resulted in the hacking of personal data of Facebook users
There are many rumors about the consequences of what is the biggest bug in the history of the American group led by Mark Zuckerberg. “The personal data of 1.5 billion #Facebook users is for sale on the hacking forum. They include names, surnames, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, location and gender. “
As the source of their comments, Internet users cite Privacy Affairs, a specialized news site which published a item on hackers who “claim to own and sell personal data on 1.5 billion Facebook users”. Posted on the day of the outage, the article was later updated with the following clarification: “This has nothing to do with the global Facebook outage that occurred on October 4, 2021.” And the author of the article to evoke a simple “coincidence”.
The Facebook communication team wanted to reassure its users in a communicated : ” We do not have […] no evidence that user data has been compromised as a result of this downtime. “
The domain name Facebook.com was for sale
Imagine the great deal: owning one of the most visited sites on the Internet, Facebook.com. Following the outage, Internet users assured that the domain name was for sale. Even Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, slightly mockingly, had bought it.
The illusion, created by Monday’s blackout, was quickly dispelled: DomainTools, a site that allows you to see the evolution of domain names, confirmed with the correspondent in the United States of 20 minutes “That a third party tried to list [le nom de domaine Facebook.com] on sale “. DomainTools then included the ad “by mistake” in the search results on its site.
GoDaddy, a company that sells domain names, offered an explanation similar to our colleagues from The Mac Observer.