Facebook experienced hiccups on early morning, Friday, when some users had trouble accessing the social networking site. Subsequently, a group of hackers claiming to be from the 'Anonymous' hactivist group, said that they were the ones who disrupted the service because they are against the privacy policies of Facebook.
A 15-minute video, which was posted to the Web Site AnonNews, called for the attack, code-named "Operation Face Flood." The members identified themselves as part of 'Anonymous' and said they did not like the way Facebook makes money from users' data. They also accused the site of removing Facebook pages set up by 'Anonymous'. A Web Site that tracks outages, downforeveryoneorjustme.com, reported Facebook down early Friday morning but that the service returned between 9 a.m. and 9:40 a.m. Eastern time. Also, According to just-ping.com, packets were being lost Friday morning at Facebook locations in Stockholm, Shanghai, Copenhagen, Oslo, and Lisbon; checkpoints were unavailable in San Francisco and Moscow; and an unknown host message was generated in Beijing.
This is not the first time that Facebook has been attacked. In March, Facebook experienced a number of outages in Europe. Those outages were the product of DDoS attacks - a common tactic used by hackers. 'Anonymous' has threatened Facebook even in the past. In August 2011, this clandestine group threatened to "kill Facebook" on November 5. As that date approached, however, it scoffed off its plans for that attack. However, a Facebook spokesman told Computerworld that the downtime was not caused by an attack. The company did not specify what was causing the trouble.
Meanwhile, Facebook users got a chance to express their frustrations on Facebook's competitor Twitter. Here are some of the tweets:
"Facebook is currently down. The world's productivity just increased by 1200%," tweeted JohnMikulski.
OptimusSubprime tweeted : "Yes, folks, it's true, #Facebook is down. You'll have to go somewhere else to find out who went to Red Lobster after work today."
THEmikewhite tweeted : "In case you're wondering, Facebook is down because the National Spelling Bee is the Super Bowl for the people who should be fixing Facebook."
