Facebook & Instagram say they were not hit with a DDoS attack

You may have noticed you had a bunch of extra time on your hands. That’s because Facebook–as well as other services it owns such as Instagram and WhatsApp–were intermittently down for the last many hours. It seems that now the services are back up–Instagram tweeted a GIF of Oprah to herald to the world its return:

Anddddd… we’re back. pic.twitter.com/5E8UdlcsPJ

— Instagram (@instagram) March 14, 2019

I checked and Facebook seems to be working fine for me, too–although it has not tweeted an update yet about whether all systems are go, and the website Down Detector says there are still hundreds of people reporting outages.

It’s still unclear what caused the downtime, but a rumor circulating online blamed a possible “denial of service” attack–where an attacker floods a network with traffic to overload and shut it down. Facebook, however, categorically denied this, as my colleague Steven Melendez wrote last night in his post about the outage.

We’re focused on working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, but can confirm that the issue is not related to a DDoS attack.

— Facebook (@facebook) March 13, 2019

It’s still unclear what caused the prolonged downtime. But we may have to set this specific online speculation to rest. And at least we can all go back to mindlessly scrolling through Instagram again.