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DICT still waiting for Facebook report on outage


The brief inaccessibility of Facebook experienced by users in parts of the world was not caused by a cyber attack, the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) said on Thursday.

"Facebook being that large will not be easily be brought down by any DDOS attack," DICT Acting Secretary Eliseo Rio Jr. told reporters in a press briefing in Quezon City.

Rio, however, said that Facebook had yet to formally notify the DICT regarding the outage.

DICT Cybersecurity bureau chief and Assistant Secretary Allan Cabanlong said the department was constantly in touch with Facebook regarding the issue.

"We are waiting for Facebook's final report. Rest assured we are monitoring the social media health in the country," Cabanlong said.

Rio said that the Facebook outage was caused more likely by a submarine cable problem, citing the earlier incidents of the social media platform's outage.

DDOS refers to distributed denial of service is a form of cyber attack where multiple internet connections are used to flood a target, making fake traffic to overwhelm a network.

The California-based social media giant, which has more than two billion users, acknowledged the outage after users noted on Twitter they could not access Facebook or had limited functionality. 

In a separate statement, Facebook confirmed that the outage was not due to an attack.

"We're focused on working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, but can confirm that the issue is not related to a DDoS attack," Facebook said.

Last November, a Facebook outage was attributed to a server problem and a September 2018 outage was said to be the result of "networking issues." —NB, GMA News

Tags: dict, eliseorio
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