The recent global outage of Instagram and Facebook was not caused by a cyber attack, but the US government closely followed the developments, Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), said in an online interview to Washington Post.
When asked whether the outage was caused by a cyber attack, she replied: "From everything that I have seen, this was not any sort of malicious attack or hack, it was really a configuration error, it was a technology outage," TASS reports.
In her words, CISA closely watched the situation, because if this had been some sort of a major cyber incident, we wanted to make sure that we were keeping an eye on all other critical infrastructure that could be impacted as well."
She added that the CICA team "were not directly in touch" with Facebook, which also owns the Instagram social network.
On October 4, users across the world reported a massive crash of a number of internet resources, including social media giants like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. It took more than 6.5 hours to fix the problem, which stemmed from an error made by Facebook engineers during the updating process. They ultimately had to update the databases manually.
