If you haven't been surfing the net for a while, Facebook and many other services are down.
It's like, down.
Ironically, despite the fact that one of the largest sources for misinformation was disappearing, people quickly flocked to other platforms like Twitter to discover the reason. They also ended up sharing a lot of misinformation on Twitter.
Twitter was one example. Many dubious accounts began to claim that data from over 1.5 billion Facebook users was being sold via a hacking-related forum. They cited a Privacy Affairs writeup, a Romanian cybersecurity research company.
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Privacy Affairs claims that this is the largest and most important Facebook data dump. Privacy Affairs refers to a hacker forum user who posted an announcement about the hack.
The timing of the tweet could not have been more timely, considering the outage and despite the fact the forum posts date back as far as September 22.
Tweets echoing this claim received tens of thousand of likes, shares, and even endorsements from several verified Twitter accounts with large followings.
It is unclear if the hacker and authenticity of the hack are connected to Facebook's huge outage. This seems incredibly unlikely. Cybersecurity experts agree that it is more likely that the downtime was caused by human error than hacking.
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The New York Times was also informed by several Facebook security personnel that the issue was unlikely to have been caused by a cyberattack.
Brian Krebs, a journalist, wrote that it could have been caused by an internal system-wide update or change. At this point, it's just speculation. Facebook is the only one who can control its DNS records.
In the past few years, there have been many instances that support this theory.
The outage occurred the day after Frances Haugen (a former employee of Facebook) came forward with a highly-publicized interview with CBS.
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The documents leak seems to have nothing to do with the purported hacking of Facebook user data.
Facebook and many other services have disappeared without explanation. It is not clear what caused them to disappear. Rumours are swirling.
The internet traffic to much of the West is affected by the Facebook outage. The same applies to misinformation. This is what the world without Facebook might look like.
READ MORE: Facebook and Instagram hit by global outage [Reuters]
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Facebook is experiencing a strange outage.
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