VOGH Exclusive: Xbox Live Outage Caused For Networking Misconfiguration, Not Hacker Attack

Microsoft Said Xbox Live Outage Caused For Networking Misconfiguration During Routine Maintenance, Not Hacker Attack 

Xbox Live -one of the world's most popular and usually very reliable gaming network which rarely has unexpected outages, nor does Microsoft ever take it down for any extended period of time. But accident occurs, and it happened in last Sunday. The software giant and the developer of Xbox - Microsoft has reported a significant Xbox Live outage, rendering the service unavailable since earlier last 13th afternoon, smack in the middle of the peak weekend usage period. The outage is preventing users from signing in to Xbox Live, blocking access to the online services normally available through the console. While acknowledging the issue, on their official Xbox Live Status page Microsoft said “There is still an issue members are having signing in to Xbox LIVE, we greatly appreciate you sticking it out with us while we work as hard as we can to get this problem fixed. Keep checking back here every 30 minutes for another update on our progress.” This update came from Microsoft at 3:30 Pacific time on 13th of April. As soon as this story get spotted, several hikes rises. Among this buzz, it was a few unnamed hacker who took credit of the Xbox outage, while declaring that a cyber attack. Another buzz which just got spread so quickly, was that the outage of Xbox Live network has been caused by hacker collective Anonymous.  Here we must have to say that those buzz have some solid reasons as couple of months ago Windows Azure faced an organized cyber attack which effected the service of Azure storage, Xbox Live and 52 other. And that outage or in other word service interruption stays for 12 long hours. But unlike earlier, this time the issue get resolved immediately. Within one hour all the service get restored and came back to its normal order. On the same Xbox Live Status page Microsoft said “If you were one of the members who was having issues signing in to Xbox LIVE, good news! This issue has been fixed! Thank you so much for your patience during this time, feel free to go enjoy your favorite games and content!”

So far we have discussed about the story of the outage and it's restoration. Now we will talk about the cause of this interruption. As I have said earlier that the rumor of hacker's attack was there which was claiming responsibility of the Xbox Live outage. But in reality it was not due to cyber attack but some internal network problems. In their official respond of the situation and those buzz Microsoft completely dines all those rumors and said  "The Xbox Live service outage on 13 April resulted from networking misconfiguration during routine maintenance and was in no way related to false claims of hacking the service." 

While talking about Xbox outage, we would like to remind you that - another world famous gaming console 'PlayStation' had fallen victim to cyber attacks. It was Anonymous who hit Sony PSN and caused massive outage, data leak and many other devastating damages. 

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Hackers Hit Microsoft Windows Azure Causing 12 Hour Outage, Affecting Xbox & 52 Other Services

Hackers Hit Microsoft Windows Azure Causing 12 Hour Outage, Affecting Xbox & 52 Other Services 

Windows Azure the cloud computing platform of Microsoft for building, deploying and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters  faced an unwanted disaster due to organized cyber attack which interrupted its service world wide. While looking at the scenario the Redmond based software giant sincerely apologize for the interruption and any issues it has caused and declared that they will  refund Windows Azure customers impacted by the said outage last week caused by an expired SSL certificate. The Windows Azure Storage outage affected at least 52 services, including Xbox Live on Thursday night and Friday. 

In a blog post while describing the situation Microsoft said - "HTTP traffic was unaffected but the event impacted a number of Windows Azure services that are dependent on Storage.  We executed the repair steps to update the SSL certificate on the impacted clusters and availability was restored to >99% worldwide by 1:00 AM PST on February 23.  At 8:00 PM PST on February 23, we completed the restoration effort and confirmed full availability worldwide. Given the scope of the outage, we will proactively provide credits to impacted customers in accordance with our SLA. The credit will be reflected on a subsequent invoice.  Our teams are also working hard on a full root cause analysis (RCA), including steps to help prevent any future reoccurrence."

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Facebook Outage in Many European Countries Not Caused By Anonymous But DNS Problem

Facebook Outage in Many European Countries Not Caused By Anonymous But DNS Problem 

World's most popular and largest social network Facebook faced another downtime. This time the outage effected millions of users in European countries including Denmark, France, Norway, Germany and Italy. After June this is the second outage which effected large number of Facebook users. Last time Facebook users faced disturbance while using their favorite social network. Facebook users across the globe experienced log-in difficulties for several hour. But this time, the social networking giant remain down for a decent time. The outage may have caused Facebook’s share price to go down. For a site with 900 million users worldwide, even a minor outage has a huge effect. Like the June issue, here also hacker collective came first and took credit of the outage. According to a twitter account of the hacktivist group named  Anonymous Own3r, took responsibility of the outage, In his tweet he claimed to figure out several vulnerabilities in Facebook, which causes the outage. In a pastebin note, the hacker publishes those so called vulnerabilities. Also in his tweet the hacker claimed to have control in many servers owned by Facebook. 

But Facebook completely denies the hacker attack & said the cause of the outage was nothing but DNS issue, neither hacker attack nor DDoS.  Here we want yo give you reminder that in 2011 Anonymous openly declared to take down Facebook. The operation was dubbed #Op-Facebook and Anonymous told that they will hit FB on the 5th of November last year. But in reality it was just a threat and as expected Anonymous failed to execute Operation Facebook. Later in June this year, Anonymous took credit for a couple of hours outage of Facebook, and here again Anonymous affiliated member repeated the same story, which again proves completely baseless, and in short it was nothing but a publicity stunt. 

In case of large social network like Facebook, such kind of DNS issues can be happened. Whatever immediately after this outage Facebook released a statement saying -

"There has not been a hack of Facebook. We have investigated these claims, and they are not valid. The evidence cited was produced by an automated vulnerability scanner that alerts developers of potential vulnerability, and we have found these all to be false alerts.

We expect Anonymous just like we expect any other attack on any other day. Due to our size, we face the same threats as seen everywhere else on the Web, but we have developed partnerships, back-end systems, and protocols to confront the full range of security challenges we face. Facebook has always been committed to protecting our users’ information, and we will continue to innovate and work tirelessly to defend this data.

Earlier (Thursday), we made a change to DNS as part of a traffic-optimization test, and that change resulted in some users being temporarily misrouted. We detected and resolved the issue immediately, but a small number of users located primarily in Western Europe experienced issues accessing the site while the DNS addresses repopulated. We are now back to 100 percent, and we apologize for any inconvenience..."

-Source (All Facebook)

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GoDaddy Outage Was Not Beacuse of Hacker Attack But Technical Difficulties

GoDaddy Outage Was Not Beacuse of Hacker Attack But Technical Difficulties 

GoDaddy -the website which is widely known as a DNS and hosting provider remained down for most of time on 10th September came back online in the 10th evening. As expected thousands of other web sites reportedly went offline as their hosting provider GoDaddy experienced massive service disruptions. GoDaddy, which claims to be the world's biggest web hosting company, confirmed the problems on its official Twitter account but has not yet stated the cause of the disruptions. A hacker code named "Anonymous Own3r" on Twitter took responsibility of the outage. The attack came on behalf of the hacker collective group 'Anonymous' as a protest against GoDaddy's support of the SOPA act. The hacker stated the reason of the outage is a massive denial of service (DDoS) attack which was generated from an IRC-Botnet. A tweet from the @AnonOpsLegion account: "#TangoDown -- http://www.godaddy.com/ | by@AnonymousOwn3r" was the initial public promotion of the outage, leading some to believe that the Anonymous online activist collective was behind the disruption. However, the AnonymousOwn3r account clarified in various tweets that: "it's not Anonymous coletive [sic] the attack is coming just from me." But this claim was later disputed by posts from the @YourAnonNews account which is known to be one of the legitimate twitter source of Anon. 

After completing the investigation of the outage, GoDaddy released a press note where they have clearly said that the outage was not because of DDoS attack but internal technical difficulties. According to Scott Wagner Go Daddy CEO -

"GoDaddy.com and many of our customers experienced intermittent service outages starting shortly after 10 a.m. PDT. Service was fully restored by 4 p.m. PDT. The service outage was not caused by external influences. It was not a "hack" and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS). We have determined the service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables. Once the issues were identified, we took corrective actions to restore services for our customers and GoDaddy.com. We have implemented measures to prevent this from occurring again.

At no time was any customer data at risk or were any of our systems compromised. Throughout our history, we have provided 99.999% uptime in our DNS infrastructure. This is the level our customers expect from us and the level we expect of ourselves. We have let our customers down and we know it. We take our business and our customers' businesses very seriously. We apologize to our customers for these events and thank them for their patience."

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Outage Day -Google Talk & Twitter Knocked Offline For Hours

Outage Day -Google Talk & Twitter Knocked Offline For Hours 

Yet again social networking giant Twitter faced massive cyber attacks which interrupts its normal service. Millions of people across the planet were having problems while accessing Twitter on Thursday, a day before the 2012 Olympic Games are expected to cause a spike in use of the micro-blogging site. The San Francisco-based company acknowledged the problem, saying "Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue". Visitors to the site were greeted with a half-formed message partially in code saying that "Twitter is currently down."

At the time of outage, VOGH team took the above screen shot which clearly indicating that twitter was indeed down. Sluggishness or outages were reported from countries in North America, Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. Some users were apparently able to post updates known as 'tweets' through their phones or third-party  applications. About an hour after issues were first spotted, service appeared to be restored in parts of the U.S. and Asia, but users elsewhere continued to report problems. So far Twitter did not confirmed the reason of this disturbance. But its predictable that the cause of this outage was either cyber attack or some kind of technical issues. We also like to remind you that, this is not the first time; last month a hacker collective group named UG Nazi performed massive denial of service attack which send Twitter offline for a certain peroid. 

_________

Not only Twitter, Google Talk the popular instant messaging service used by millions across the world, suffered a massive outage lasting over four hours. The outage, which started around 4PM India time, affected users across the world. Millions of Google Talk users around the globe reported that they could log into the service, saw their contacts with the respective status but failed to send messages to them. Some other users could not log in. Google immediately acknowledged that Google Talk service was having some issues at 4.10pm, saying, "We're investigating reports of an issue with Google Talk."

The service is not only used by people to keep in touch with friends but has also become a popular way to interact with co-workers in offices.

According to Google, the service was restored around 8.25pm. "Google Talk service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change," said the company. Nearly 40 minutes after this message, the company declared that Google Talk service was fully restored. "The problem with Google Talk should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better," it said. Earlier, Google responded fast to the problem. 

"We're aware of a problem with Google Talk affecting a majority of users. The affected users are able to access Google Talk, but are seeing error messages and/or other unexpected behavior. We will provide an update by 7/26/12 5.20pm detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change," the company said on the status page of Google Talk app. After that the company provided hourly report on the outage.

However, like Twitter Google also did not explain what caused the outage and how many users were affected by it.

-Source (TOI)

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