Late Thursday night and into Friday morning, users of Facebook in several countries, experienced disruptions in the service. Members of the hacker group known as Anonymous took responsibility for the outage in a 15 min video posted online. In the video, Facebook was accused of removing the groups' pages, and the members also stated that they disliked the fact that Facebook was using personal information to generate income.
Anonymous is often cited as a fractious collection of hackers, with no central authority or leadership, and there has been some debate within the group itself as to whether Facebook should be targeted.
Although some members within the group have issued threats and may have unsuccessfully attempted to attack Facebook, others see the social network as a valuable resource.
The first announcement that Facebook had been attacked apparently came from YourAnonNews, a separate group that is also affiliated with Anonymous. However, on Friday, the claim was denied. "Anonymous would never attack Facebook, we have said this many times. Why would we attack a tool that many anons use to spread info?" was posted in the group's Twitter stream.
Companies involved in load testing and monitoring performance reported that Facebook suffered intermittent service disruptions both Thursday night and on early Friday morning. Apica, a website load testing and performance monitoring provider, reported that there were increased response times and periods of unavailability between the hours of 8:28 p.m. and 10:29 p.m. ET on Thursday May 31, and between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. ET on Friday June 1.
Facebook, although acknowledging that there were disruptions in the service, had no comment about Anonymous. The company stated simply that some users had problems in loading the site, but did not the problem to a denial of service attack.
In Europe, Facebook experienced a number of outages in March 2012. The Cyber Emergency Response Team (CERT) based in Belgium, stated that those disruptions were DDoS attacks, which is a common tactic used by hackers. At the time, Facebook also did not acknowledge any connection between the disruption and Anonymous.
