Facebook back online after 6-hour worldwide outage, worst since 2008

 

MILWAUKEE (CBS 58) -- Facebook suffered a worldwide outage Monday, Oct. 4, leaving users confused and concerned. Was it a cyber attack?

The Department of Homeland Security has a division known as CISA that looks specifically at cyber crime.

At this point in the investigation, Facebook isn't saying what caused it.

Facebook stopped working around 10:40 a.m. Monday morning. A tweet of apology called it networking issues and said teams were working fast to debug it.

"It's a very complex issue, you know, securing all the networks," said Brian Dorow, chief homeland security advisor for Mitre Corporation.

The outage took down Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp and lasted about six hours.

Dorow says CISA -- that's the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency -- is likely involved in the investigation.

"Certainly if they tie it to a criminal network you're gonna have the Federal Bureau of Investigation or FBI actively involved in this, and then a lot of other departments, but certainly CISA would take the lead of something like this," he said.

For some, talk of the who-dunnit has centered on an interview by CBS' 60 Minutes.

A Facebook whistleblower said the company is aware of how its platforms can be used to spread hate. All this, leading to unsettled feelings for some users Monday.

"I can see why people have a little apprehension when something of this size occurs and what it means to them, and they lose that ability to communicate on Facebook. But they certainly want facts as to why it happened. You know that may resolve it once they learn more, but certainly the apprehension is probably at a very high level because of what happened, and we rely so much on these devices," said Dorow.

This was Facebook's worst outage since 2008.