The idea of Anonymous (or one of the splinter factions) taking down Facebook is something that we have heard about and even discussed at length. It is something of a double edged sword for both the press and also for many inside the group. As we have followed Anonymous and tried to get something of a psychological profile on the collective (something that is not easy at all) we have found that while they are greatly opposed to many of the things that Facebook does and the corporate monster they are becoming, the social networking site still represents a method of open and free communication.  Taking down Facebook would be counterproductive and also remove an important tool for disseminating information to the global internet community.

Meanwhile the press loves to post anything that even remotely appears to be related to Anonymous taking down Facebook, it is nice a juicy and bound to get people reading. It is like Duke Nukem Forever; anything about it, even redundant information, is good to print.

So we poked around after the announcement and found out a few things. The first is that Facebook has been having some API load errors, but these are not related to a DOS attack from any outside source. Some of the load time errors are because of continued issues with Verizon’s core network. There were brief outages over the past three or four days that affected areas in the southeast and the Midwest. These were confirmed by a few external sources (routine trouble tickets for internet issues) and also with Facebook’s push to make everyone use their new TimeLine feature. Facebook has also made a statement saying that the reported DOS never happened.

As for the Twitter post; we are not sure of the origin of that just yet. However we do know that if this was really a DOS attack from Anon, it was not a very successful  one. Typically Anonymous is able to bring more to the party than a simple increase in API response time. We were active on Facebook (both mobile and web) around the time the attack was going on and had no issues connecting.

The question remains; will a portion of Anonymous take down Facebook on Sunday? We have the feeling that they won’t; not because they are not capable of doing so, but more because Facebook is not at the point where they represent something that Anonymous sees as an internet “Evil”. In time this may change, but I do not think we are there just yet.

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