UPDATE: It turns out the video in question is not actually of some fantastical Facebook attack after all. Fro Techcrunch:
We’ve looked into this further, however, and it turns out this attack bore no relation to Facebook’s outage on Thursday. For one thing, we’re told the time stamps don’t square up quite correctly. We’ve updated this post’s headline to make that completely clear. Meanwhile, Facebook says its initial statement that the outage was due to an internal software configuration error still stands.
So, as action-packed as it is, the video above was just another of the many global DDOS attacks that regularly occur in cyberland (showing why companies like Facebook have had to erect top-notch security teams for constant protection.) Technology companies large and small are increasingly targets for such attacks — as more people come online, the potential for havoc gets larger.
Pretty easy to believe though when the video spread over the weekend. Even with the lack of a Facebook connection though, that’s a lot of attention being thrown via cyberspace. William Gibson just had a seizure.
Early on Thursday morning, the rarest of occurrences happened: Facebook went down. For thirty minutes no one could access any of their photos, statuses or fan pages. It was clearly pandemonium. From Time:
Users around the world were greeted with the notification: “Sorry, something went wrong.”
It was among Facebook’s longest outages since 2010, when servers went down for 2.5 hours, according to Bloomberg. But Facebook now says it’s back up to 100 percent. The cause of the outage was not immediately known.
Of course now we know that a massive DDOS attack was the cause of the thirty minute crash and it looks like something out of War Games when you see it visualized on the screen. Tournaments Replay uploaded this video of the attack via Norse Attack Timeline and it really puts it into perspective.
And think of it how you will. Either it’s scary that the biggest site on the planet was taken out completely for thirty minutes, or it’s pretty cool that it only took thirty minutes to get the largest site in the world back up and running.
(Via Tournaments Replay)