Anonymous: During yesterday’s Facebook and Instagram outages a number of members of Anonymous began rejoicing on “Tangodown.” Unfortunately, none of them seemed to know who among them had carried out the attack, though some tied it to “Op2019.” Op2019, much like OpTakeDown, is a generic operation which has no real mission or purpose. The Tangodown messages continued into the afternoon, unfortunately none of them seemed to have any idea how or why it happened. Facebook later came out and stated that the issues being experienced by many users of Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp was being caused by a “database issue” and was not caused by a DDoS attack or any other cyber-attack. No further details have been given at this time, only about what the issue was. Following the statement from Facebook, the posts on Twitter from Anons quickly stopped but the Anonymous IRCs continued with claims that Facebook was covering up the attack, even though no one knew who was behind the supposed attack.
Analyst Notes
It is not uncommon when a popular website suffers any sort of outage for any reason for members of Anonymous to instantly believe that it was caused by a DDoS attack. While some may still continue to believe that an attack caused the outage, public claims will likely end and private discussions on Anonymous IRCs will trail off over the coming days, although some will probably continue to believe that Facebook is covering up an attack that somebody, somewhere, may have carried out somehow, for some reason even without any evidence to support their belief.
