Update: Facebook confirms this definitely wasn’t a hack. See the bottom of this post for their full explanation.
Facebook is down for many users in Europe (France, Germany, Norway, Italy and Greece reported so far), according to several TC tipsters and widespread reports on Twitter. Twitter user @AnonymousOwn3r is claiming responsibility, as he had done in the past for a major GoDaddy outage as well. Later, GoDaddy claimed that a technical problem on its own end was responsible, not any hacking attack, however, and the cause of this current European outage is still unknown.
In the case of the GoDaddy outage, that company claimed that the DNS problems that brought down thousands of its websites was actually caused by “a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables,” and not Anonymous Own3r, as had been originally claimed by that individual’s Twitter account toward the beginning of the outage.
We’re looking into the cause of Facebook’s downtime (DNS issues are being cited by some), and have reached out to Facebook to find out more. Let us know if you’re in Europe and whether or not you’re able to access the social network, we’ll keep updating as we learn more.
Update: A user in France reports that simply switching to Facebook’s mobile site can restore service for those affected:
#facebookisdown in #europe #facebook #DNS #Down – use touch.facebook.com
— canalcoffee (@canalcoffee) October 11, 2012
Update 2: It’s unclear how wide-reaching this is – some claims now that it’s only affecting a small percentage of European users:
#RTNews #SkyNews #BBCNews #GoogleNews No reports on #Facebook going down over #Europe Only affected a small amount of people RT #Anonymous
— Anon_Online (@Anon_Online) October 11, 2012
Update 3: Add Romania to the list of countries affected:
@techcrunch @drizzled Facebook down in Romania too. A fix is to use google dns 8.8.8.8
— Cristian Baciu (@baciucristian) October 11, 2012
Update 4: Reports now coming in that service has been restored:
@techcrunch @drizzled Looks like its up again, at least in Central Europe.
— Chris Ciapala (@KCiapala) October 11, 2012
Update 5: More reports of service restored, after at least an hour long outage:
@techcrunch @drizzled FB back in France after at least 1 hour down
— Alain Mevellec (@netking17) October 11, 2012
Update 5: Facebook has given us official word: This isn’t a hack, they say, and provided a full statement:
Earlier today we made a change to DNS as part of a traffic optimization test, and that change resulted in some users being temporarily mis-routed. We detected and resolved the issue immediately, but a small number of users located primarily in Western Europe experienced issues accessing the site while the DNS addresses repopulated. We are now back to 100 percent, and we apologize for any inconvenience.