By REBECCA RUTHERFORD
Los Alamos
For the Los Alamos Daily Post
Ah yes, 10:00 a.m. EST, March 5th, 2024… a day that would live in infamy…the day Facebook crashed!
Facebook users across the world were disconcertingly logged out of their accounts, then received an ominous error message when they tried to log back in.
Many users (obviously not me! :P) panicked, thinking that their accounts had been hacked, or that they had finally posted that one over the top meme that earned them time in Facebook jail (banned!).
OK yes, I did panic for about 5 minutes wondering if I had somehow been hacked, then logic returned and I checked out google to see if Facebook was down. My favorite site for checking if there is an outage, or if it is just me, is downdetector.com
This site is great, it’s free and you can tell in real time if a service is having issues. In this case the search showed me that they had received 45,000 user reports of a problem! By the end of the outage it had peaked at over 500,000 error reports, half a million users affected. Yikes.
What happened? Facebook is being vague and has mentioned a technical issue which has been resolved. Rumors abound, but my best guess is that it was something stupid and boring. It was probably a bad configuration, update or something pushed out that shouldn’t have been, as opposed to something exciting like a cyber attack. After a few hours whatever the issue was, it was resolved and service was restored.
When something like this happens, don’t panic, check to see if it’s part of a wider outage. As long as your account is protected with a strong, unique password AND multi-factor authentication (MFA) your account probably has not been hacked. Once you put MFA on your account it becomes a lot more difficult to compromise. If a bad actor gets your password and email and tries to login from their own device, they won’t be able to – unless they can socially engineer the MFA codes out of you, which is certainly possible. That said, lock your accounts down with MFA and you are doing quite a lot to increase your security, and decrease your overall stress.
A strong, unique password is great, but it is no longer enough to protect your accounts, you need to get MFA on as many accounts as possible. Do I sound like a broken record? Probably, but yes you really, really, REALLY need to put MFA on all your accounts that you want to protect from compromise.
Don’t panic, lock your accounts down with MFA, and heck, log out of Facebook and get outside and enjoy the nice weather! Stay safe online, protect your accounts, and don’t panic!