What Happened to Take Down Facebook?

Remember, the first report is almost always wrong.

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On Monday Oct. 4 I got an email from someone touting the idea that Facebook had been taken down by a Denial-of-Service attack.

I considered sharing that information, but thought better of it because it was so new in the outage that I wondered if that explanation would be the right one. Hence, I deferred to something I’ve advocated for, a longtime a Holdeman quote: “Remember the first report is almost always wrong.” And, in this case, it was.

See below for the sequence of events, which did not include any external sources acting in nefarious ways.

“Facebook goes down: What happened, and what happens next”

The fragility of the Internet and all our technological solutions is pointed out by this incident. Redundancy!!
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Eric Holdeman is a contributing writer for Emergency Management magazine and is the former director of the King County, Wash., Office of Emergency Management.