Facebook Fixed, but Did Outage Hurt Trust?

Amid widespread speculation that a cyber-attack caused the outage of Facebook's services earlier this week, the social media platform contends that the issue was the result of a server configuration change. Despite the array of questions about when it made the change to the server and when it realized that the configuration error had triggered the outage, Facebook spokesperson Tom Parnell told Infosecurity, “Yesterday, we made a server configuration change that triggered a cascading series of issues. As a result, many people had difficulty accessing our apps and services. We have resolved the issues, and our systems have been recovering over the last few hours. We are very sorry for the inconvenience, and we appreciate everyone’s patience.” In a separate email, another spokesperson confirmed that the outage was not the result of a DDoS attack. A day earlier, “a Facebook spokesperson told CNN Business that despite some online rumors, the issue was not caused by a hack or an attack, adding that the company was focused on resolving the issue and hoped to eventually share details about what caused the problem,” CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan wrote on March 14.