Facebook Outage Conspiracy Theories Spread Even Without Facebook

Image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Facebook, as well as WhatsApp and Instagram, have been gone from the internet for hours. 

Internet users, clearly, are freaking out. Facebook has stated very little about what is actually taking place, however the outage is at the moment seemingly affecting only Facebook and its services. Many experts believe it to be associated to issues with internet infrastructure, particularly DNS and BGP.

Short for for Domain Name System, the DNS is a service that permits the internet to run by translating domains such as Facebook.com into IP addresses and vice versa. For some unknown reason, Facebook’s DNS records, in addition to BGP records, are gone from the internet. BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) is the system that figures out the best route for a packet to travel across the internet.

In this information vacuum, however, conspiracy theorists have begun speculating that this can be a massive hack, that it’s tied to Sunday evening’s “60 Minutes” episode during which a Facebook whistleblower said that Facebook is intentionally misleading the public and the federal government on its efforts to curb hate speech and misinformation, or is otherwise related to Facebook’s current problems in the news. 

A music studio recording business posted a screenshot of what look to be a bunch of DNS addresses on Twitter and speculated that Facebook is gone forever, which quickly went viral with literally no context by any means. The screenshot appears to be stolen from one other Twitter account known as KillFearNY, which describes itself as a creative and sports agency.

Probably the most popular theories has centered around a supposed hack that resulted in 1.5 billion Facebook records being sold on a hacking forum. In this version, individuals are pointing to a September 22 post from a supposed company referred to as X2Emails which has “more than 1.5b Database of Facebook these database scraped this year and 100% emails are included and phone as well” and is somehow linked to today’s outage.

This theory does not even pass the smell test, though. The person who posted the advertisement does not even pretend the info was stolen from Facebook. The post says it was “scraped,” and it only contains: “We only have these fields : Emails , Gender , Location , cities , dob , phone numbers , names , uid.” Scraped databases of Facebook users show up on a regular basis and have little or nothing to do with any kind of hack.

What’s worse—or better depending on your viewpoint—is that it is very likely that this is all a scam anyway. 

One other user in the forum thread alerted others to not trust the seller.

“Scammer. Only sends [a sample of] 20 users. There isn’t any more. Doesn’t accept escrow(moderator). However he expects you to believe in 20 samples and send $5,000.  Instead of 1.5 billion, I believe there are 150 users of data for social engineering.  “

Aric Toler, a researcher at Bellingcat, was one of the first ones to report that folks needs to be cautious and never take this at face value. 

The fact that some wannabe hacker advertises scraped data on a hacking forum that anybody can access is nothing new. It occurs every other week. Typically, hackers who post on Raid Forums do have actual hacked data, however generally they’re simply attempting to rip-off other users.

Even other forum users aren’t taking it seriously.

“Hahahaha 600 TB of Mark Zucker burger selfies :D,” one person posted in a chat. 

Facebook couldn’t be reached for comment due to the outage, which nonetheless has seemingly brought about mass chaos not just online but offline, too. Reporters at the New York Times, for instance, have noted that Facebook employees have been unable to get into certain buildings. Facebook employees have additionally had to talk with each other using secondary messaging services like Discord and Zoom. 

In January of this year, Motherboard reported on a real incident where attackers scraped Facebook, obtaining a database of 500 million accounts. That database included phone numbers of people that actively tried to keep that data personal. Two months later somebody dumped the database on a hacking forum, according to reports at the time.

We’re still unsure what’s happening at Facebook, and an outage of this severity and length is unprecedented in Facebook history. There could very well be a very interesting explanation for the outage, however we simply do not know enough to say what caused it yet. One thing we’ve learned, though, is that conspiracy theories can spread across the internet just fine without Facebook.