The social networking chief made their public offering on Feb. 1. The day afterward, Facebook, the site with over 845 million users, was briefly unavailable to many users.
Many suspected the spontaneous error was caused by the anonymous hacking group appropriately named Anonymous. Barret Brown, an Anonymous member gave this tweet which made some think the error was caused by the hacker group.
#Facebook having mysterious troubles in midst of IPO computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/telec… #Anonymous
— Barrett Brown (@BarrettBrownLOL) February 2, 2012
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This is not the first time Anonymous might have tried to temporarily shut down Facebook. Anonymous threatened Facebook and all of its 60,000+ servers on Jan. 28 but did not succeed. Earlier that week, Facebook had accessibility problems and Anonymous seemed to be behind it, but nothing is sure.
cough cough, uh, looks like facebook.com is having a slight accessibility problem. #Anonymous
— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) January 26, 2012
Anonymous’s intent to shut down the social media giant was explained in this audio clip from the hacking group.
“If you are a willing activist or a guy who just wants to protect the freedom of information, then join the cause and kill Facebook for the sake of your own privacy,” a the notorious computer-generated voice said in their call for action.
On Feb. 12, Facebook again went down to many users, claiming it would return in a few hours after “improving the site”.
Facebook has denied that Anonymous caused any of its server errors.
A Facebook spokesperson told CNET, “We pushed out code too aggressively some time between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. Everything is fine now.”
Photo: (cc) Ludovic Toinel