Popular social media platforms Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram faced an approximately six-hour global outage on October 4, which saw Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth plummet by $ 6 billion.
And now if some social media users are to be believed, a 13 year old teenager chinese pirate named Sun Jisu was the cause of the blackout. The information was attributed to the global news agency Reuters.
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India Today Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) found this claim to be false. Neither Reuters nor any other credible outlet blamed a 13-year-old Chinese hacker for the outage.
WHAT FACEBOOK THE EXPERTS SAID
AFWA could not find any Reuters report linking the blackout to China. No other credible media outlet reported the involvement of a 13-year-old Chinese hacker in the incident either.
According to a Facebook blog post dated October 4, 2021, the issue arose due to a “faulty configuration change”.
Santosh Janardhan, vice president of infrastructure at Facebook, wrote in a post that the initial problem occurred in a network that Facebook calls its “backbone,†which connects its data centers across the world.
During routine maintenance, a command was issued to assess the availability of the overall capacity of the backbone network. But the order backfired, disconnecting the network and blocking communication from Facebook’s data centers, Janardhan said.
Excluding conspiracy theories that the outage occurred due to a massive hack, Facebook also said: “We want to clarify that there was no malicious activity behind this outage, its root cause was a change. configuration fault on our part. “
Quoting Facebook employees, a Reuters report published on October 4 also said the outage was caused by an “internal error” in the way Internet traffic is routed to Facebook’s systems.
“Failures in internal communication tools and other resources that depend on this same network to function have compounded the error,” the report said, citing Facebook employees.
Several cybersecurity experts also said a bad configuration by Facebook led to the blackout.
Addressing “WiredJohn Graham-Cumming, CTO of internet infrastructure company Cloudflare, said, “It looks like Facebook has done something to their routers, the ones that connect the Facebook network to the rest of the internet.”
Alex Stamos, former head of security at Facebook, also told “Wired” that the outage was due to an error in Facebook’s Domain Name System (DNS) that allows web addresses to lead users to their homes. destinations.
WHO IS THE BOY IN VIRAL PIC?
We couldn’t find any credible reports of a young Chinese hacker named Sun Jisu as mentioned in the viral posts. While searching for the photo of the boy upside down, we found it on a “Daily mail»Report published in 2014.
According to the report, the boy in the picture is indeed considered a “hacking prodigy” in China. However, his name is Wang Zhengyang and not Sun Jisu. Moreover, according to reports, he was already at least 13 years old in 2014 and would have been 20 years old by now.
According to media affiliated with the Chinese state “China.org.cnThe boy made the news in 2014 after attending the Chinese Internet Security Conference held in Beijing in September of the same year. He allegedly hacked into his school’s online system to steal his homework answers.
Therefore, it is clear that the social media claims of a 13-year-old who caused the global Facebook blackout are false. Reuters did not report any news as claimed.
ClaimAccording to Reuters, a 13-year-old Chinese hacker named Sun Jisu is behind the recent Facebook outage. ConclusionNeither Reuters nor any other credible outlet has claimed that Facebook was hacked. The social networking platform said a faulty setup resulted in the outage.
JHOOTH BOLE KAUVA KAATE
The number of crows determines the intensity of the lie.
- 1 crow: half true
- 2 crows: mostly lies
- 3 crows: Absolutely false
