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Verizon
911 service AT&T Consumer Cellular customer complaints Cyber Security Downdetector FBI mobile phone Outage service interruptions T-Mobile USCellular Verizon

Cell Service Restored Following Extensive AT&T Outage

 

AT&T has resolved issues affecting its mobile phone customers following widespread outages on Thursday, according to a company announcement.Throughout the day, tens of thousands of cell phone users across the United States reported disruptions.

Reports on Downdetector.com, a platform monitoring outages, indicated instances of no service or signal after 04:00 EST (09:00 GMT).

AT&T issued an apology to its customers and confirmed that services were fully operational again by early afternoon. The company stated its commitment to taking preventive measures to avoid similar incidents in the future. The cause of the outage is currently being investigated.

Verizon and T-Mobile informed the BBC that their networks were functioning normally. However, they acknowledged that some customers may have experienced service issues while attempting to communicate with users on different networks.

According to Downdetector, AT&T received over 74,000 customer complaints, with significant clusters in southern and eastern regions of the country.

Smaller carriers like Cricket Wireless, UScellular, and Consumer Cellular also reported interruptions in service. Complaints ranged from difficulties with calls, texts, to internet access, with many users reporting no service or signal.

Downdetector's data showed that major cities including Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Atlanta experienced high numbers of outages.

Some individuals also faced challenges with 911 services, prompting officials to advise the use of landlines, social media, or cell phones from alternative carriers in emergencies.

The widespread outage has garnered the attention of the US government, with the FBI and Department of Homeland Security launching investigations, as confirmed by John Kirby, spokesperson for the US National Security Council.

Eric Goldstein, executive assistant director for cybersecurity at the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, stated that they are collaborating with AT&T to understand the root cause of the outage and are ready to provide assistance as necessary.

Although a confidential memo reported by ABC News suggested no signs of malicious activity, CISA officials are actively investigating the incident.
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Security
BlackCat Cyber Attacks Cyberattacks Data Outage Rasnowmare Safety Security

After BlackCat Ransomware Attack, NCR Suffers Aloha POS Outage

 

NCR is experiencing an outage on its Aloha POS platform as a result of a ransomware attack claimed by the BlackCat/ALPHV gang. NCR is a software and technology consulting firm based in the United States that offers digital banking, POS systems, and payment processing solutions to restaurants, enterprises, and retailers. One of their products, the Aloha POS platform used in the hospitality industry, has been down since Wednesday, preventing consumers from using the system. After days of silence, NCR has revealed that the outage was caused by a ransomware attack on the data centers that power its Aloha POS systems.

 "As a valued customer of NCR Corporation, we are reaching out with additional information about a single data center outage that is impacting a limited number of ancillary Aloha applications for a subset of our hospitality customers, On April 13, we confirmed that the outage was the result of a ransomware incident. Immediately upon discovering this development we began contacting customers, engaged third-party cybersecurity experts and launched an investigation. Law enforcement has also been notified, " reads an email sent to Aloha POS customers.

NCR told BleepingComputer that the outage affects only a fraction of its Aloha POS hospitality customers and a "limited number of ancillary Aloha applications." Customers of Aloha POS, on the other hand, have reported on Reddit that the downtime has caused considerable problems in their business operations.

"Restaurant manager here, small franchise stuck in the Stone Age with around 100 employees. We're doing the old pen and paper right now and sending it to head office. The whole situation is a huge migraine," a customer posted to the AlohaPOS Reddit.

Other users are concerned about making payroll for their employees on time, with many customers requesting that data be manually extracted from the data files until the outage is resolved.

"We have a clear path to recovery and we are executing against it. We are working around the clock to restore full service for our customers," NCR told BleepingComputer. "In addition, we are providing our customers with dedicated assistance and workarounds to support their operations as we work toward full restoration."

Unfortunately, interruptions induced by attacks like these can take a long time to fix in a secure manner, as evidenced by the recent DISH and Western Digital breaches. While NCR did not reveal which ransomware operation was responsible for their attack, cybersecurity researcher Dominic Alivieri discovered a brief post on the BlackCat/ALPHV ransomware gang's data breach site in which the threat actors claimed responsibility.

This post also featured a snippet of the alleged NCR representative's negotiation chat exchange with the ransomware gang. The ransomware group told NCR in his discussion that they had not stolen any data from servers during the attack. However, the threat actors claimed to have stolen NCR customers' passwords and threatened to publish them if a ransom was not paid.

"We take a lot of credentials to your clients networks used to connect for Insight, Pulse, etc. We will give you this list after payment," the threat actors told NCR.

BlackCat has subsequently removed the NCR post from their data breach site, most likely in the hopes that the corporation will be prepared to negotiate a payment. The BlackCat ransomware group began operations in November 2021, using a very sophisticated encryptor that allowed for a wide range of attack customization.

The ransomware group was given the name BlackCat after discovering an image of a black cat on its data leak site. However, while discussing their activity on cyber forums and in negotiations, the threat actors refer to themselves as ALPHV.

Since its inception, the ransomware operation has grown to become one of the major ransomware operations currently operating, responsible for hundreds of attacks globally, with ransom demands ranging from $35,000 to more than $10 million.
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WhatsApp
internet outage Message Messaging Apps Outage Power Outage WhatsApp

WhatsApp: Instant Messaging App Services Restored After a 2 Hour Outage

The instant messaging app WhatsApp is restored after a two-hour-long outage on Tuesday. WhatsApp, with around a billion active users, was alerted about the global outage when hundreds of thousands of its online users reported the disruption in their messaging app. 

Reportedly, the instant messaging platform went down at 12:30 PM IST, on Tuesday. The users reported they were unable to send messages or make calls through the app, which was earlier thought of as a mere network connectivity issue. The outage was not limited to the smartphone users of the app, since users of WhatsApp web were also facing the same consequences of the disruption. 

As per a report by Downdetector, an online platform providing real-time stats and information regarding online web services, more than 11,000 online users had reported the outage, while in the United Kingdom the count was 68,000. While in Singapore, about 19,000 users reported disruption in the app since 07:50 GMT. 

Downdetector gathers status updates from various sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform, to keep track of outages. There may have been many users who were impacted by the outage. 

Additionally, WaBetaInfo, an online portal tracking WhatsApp services claimed that the issue is indeed from the server’s side and thus cannot be resolved from the online user’s end. 

Soon after acknowledging the issue, WhatsApp’s parent company Meta said that their engineers are working on the outage issue and will solve it as soon as possible. Following this, Meta Spokesperson even apologized to the users for the inconvenience.  

“We are aware that some people are currently having trouble sending messages and we are working to restore WhatsApp for everyone as quickly as possible,” says Meta Company Spokesperson. While the reason behind the outage is still not revealed by the parent company. 

Considering the popularity of the messaging app which has increasingly emerged as an important communication tool between users, businesses, and governments globally, over 100 billion messages are exchanged daily through WhatsApp as of 2020. This recent outage may have affected a large number of users, including government officials and telecom service providers.
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Users
Cyber Security Network Outage Server Server Down Users

Microsoft Exchange Online And Outlook Email Service Hit By Outage

 

Microsoft is investigating an ongoing outage affecting Microsoft 365 services after users experienced problems signing into, accessing, and receiving emails via the outlook.com gateway and Exchange Online. 

"We're investigating an issue with users accessing or experiencing degraded functionality when using Exchange Online and http://outlook.com services," Microsoft stated in a tweet via the company's official Twitter account for updates on Microsoft 365 services. 

Admins were also warned that further information about these ongoing issues may be found in the admin centre under EX401976 and OL401977. 

"We suspect there may be unexpected network drops which are contributing to the degraded experience and are reviewing diagnostic logs to understand why," the company added. 

While Redmond did not indicate the scope of the problem, hundreds of reports on DownDetector have been reported in the last 24 hours by Outlook and Exchange Online customers who have been unable or experiencing difficulty while attempting to log in or email. In an update to the Outlook.com online site, Microsoft also noted that Microsoft 365 subscribers may be unable to access the web portal or any of its features. 

Microsoft explained, "Users may be unable to access or use outlook.com services or features. We're reviewing diagnostic information and support case data to understand the cause and establish a fix. We're investigating a potential issue and checking for impact to your organization. We'll provide an update within 30 minutes." 

Another Microsoft 365 outage occurred in June, affecting consumers worldwide who attempted to access Microsoft Teams and Exchange Online. Redmond rerouted traffic to another, healthy traffic management infrastructure and performed targeted infrastructure restarts to restore service access and functioning. On July 1, Microsoft stated it fixed the issue that caused this outage. 

"We identified a section of our network infrastructure that was performing below acceptable thresholds. We've rerouted connections to alternate infrastructure and that confirmed the issue is resolved," Redmond tweeted.
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USA
Cyber Attacks Healthcare IT system OSF Healthcare Outage USA

Cyber Attacker had Prior Access to the IT Systems of OSF Healthcare Before Outage

 

The Journal Star reported that OSF HealthCare's computer systems were back up on April 25 following a two-day outage that forced the Peoria, Ill.-based health institution to implement downtime processes and policies. The outage occurred around 3:45 a.m. on April 23, as per the report. 

OSF HealthCare, based in Peoria, Ill.- started informing patients on October 1 that their personal health information had been exposed for more than six weeks as a result of a cyberattack on its IT systems earlier this year. At numerous OSF HealthCare hospitals and sites, the computer systems included patient information and records.

OSF HealthCare is a non-profit Catholic healthcare organization based in Illinois and Michigan that administers a medical group, hospital system, and other healthcare facilities. OSF HealthCare is owned and run by the Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis and is headquartered in Peoria, Illinois. 

"During the outage, downtime procedures and protocols were closely followed, which included rescheduling some appointments and procedures," an OSF HealthCare spokesperson informed. "Patient safety is at the forefront of everything we do, and any decision to delay an appointment or procedure was made with safety in mind." 

OSF HealthCare announced on its website on Oct. 1 that the outage was caused by a data security problem. After conducting an investigation, the health system learned that an unauthorized entity obtained access to its networks from March 7 to April 23. The hacker gained access to various files relating to OSF Little Company of Mary and OSF Saint Paul patients. 

The compromised data include personally identifiable information, name, birthdates, Social Security numbers, treatment information, medication information, and health insurance information. As per the warning, financial information from a "smaller subset of patients" was also compromised. 

Patients whose Social Security numbers or driver's license information were disclosed will receive free credit and identity monitoring services from the health system. OSF HealthCare further stated that new precautions and technical security procedures have been adopted to safeguard its network infrastructure. 

OSF HealthCare operates 14 hospitals and a variety of other institutions throughout Illinois and Michigan. All institutions and facilities continued to operate and also admitted new patients during the April outage.
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Outage
Cyber Risk Cyber Security Digital Security Facebook Facebook Security Outage

Facebook Outage Caused Agitation in Nations And Highlighted Risks Of Social Networking

 

The global breakdown of Facebook Inc. highlighted the dangers of depending on its social networking platforms, supporting European regulators' efforts to limit the company's influence just as a whistle-testimony blower's in the United States threatened to draw even more undesirable attention at home. 

While Europe awakened to find Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger back online and running, the extent of Monday's shutdown drew immediate and extensive outrage. Margrethe Vestager, the European Union's antitrust director and digital czar, said the Facebook failure will bring attention to the company's dominance. 

The networking issue that caused operations to go down for almost 2.75 billion people couldn't have happened at a worse moment. Following a Sunday television interview in the United States, whistle-blower Frances Haugen will testify before a Senate panel on Tuesday, telling legislators the "frightening truth" about Facebook. As Facebook services were offline, Haugen's charges that the business prioritized profit ahead of user safety were still making the headlines. 

“It’s always important that people have alternatives and choices. This is why we work on keeping digital markets fair and contestable,” Vestager said. “An outage as we have seen shows that it’s never good to rely only on a few big players, whoever they are.” 

The disclosures caused United States Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to call attention to the dangers that nations that depend on these services face. In New York, Facebook rose as high as 1.3 percent to $330.33, reversing a 4.9 percent drop on Monday. 

Facebook has increasingly been the subject of multiple antitrust and privacy probes in Europe, as well as intensive scrutiny of even minor transactions, such as its planned acquisition of a customer-service software company. Last month, the firm was fined 225 million euros ($261 million) for data privacy violations, and it is currently under investigation by the European Commission and the German competition agency Bundeskartellamt. 

In the next few months, EU lawmakers will decide on new legislation limiting the capacity of strong Internet platforms like Facebook to expand into new services. According to Rasmus Andresen, a German Green member of the European Parliament, the service outage demonstrated the "serious consequences" of relying on one firm for crucial channels of communication, and that Facebook should have never been permitted to buy Instagram and WhatsApp. 

Further, facing a political fallout - Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has a low tolerance for political criticism on social networking sites, has called for a new digital "order" as a result of the incident. According to Fahrettin Altun, his presidential communications director, the closure demonstrated how "fragile" social networks are, and urged the speedy development of "domestic and national" alternatives. 

“The problem we have seen showed us how our data are in danger, how quickly and easily our social liberties can be limited,” Altun said in a series of Twitter posts. 

President Muhammadu Buhari's communications staff, government officials, and governors in 36 Nigerian states were all silenced for six hours as a result of the outage. After Twitter's services were banned in Africa's most populous country on June 5th, the administration has become increasingly dependent on Facebook to keep the people informed. 

Facebook is “for us opposition politicians one of the last media outlets where we can talk to you and which isn’t dominated by” Fidesz, Orban’s political party, Budapest Mayor Gergely Karacsony said in a video posted on Tuesday. 

“This outage does show the over-dependence we have on a single company, and the need for diversity and greater competition,” Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group in London, said in an interview. “Their reliance on data-driven, attention-optimizing products is dangerous and needs to be challenged through interventions enabling greater competition.” 

Some telecommunications companies were forced to intervene as a result of the shutdown. In a blog post on its website, the Polish Play unit of Paris-based telecommunications operator Iliad SA reported an eightfold surge in the number of calls as of its customer service. To avoid overloading, it had to modify its network.
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VoIP
Bandwidth Cyber Attcaks DDoS DDOS Attack Outage VoIP

Bandwidth Suffers Outages Caused by DDoS Attack

 

Within the last couple of days, Bandwidth.com has been the latest target of distributed denial of service attacks targeting VoIP companies. 

Bandwidth, a firm providing Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), services to companies and resellers, revealed that it suffered a failure after reporting on the DDoS attack on the 27th of September, Monday night. 

Bandwidth Chief Executive Officer David Morken confirmed the incident and also claimed that "a number of critical communications service providers have been targeted by a rolling DDoS attack." Bandwidth started reporting unintended voice and messaging services breakdown from September 25 at 3:31 p.m. EST. 

Bandwidth has since provided periodic status updates describing voice disruptions, improved services 911 (E911), messaging, and portal access. As Bandwidth is among the world's major voicemail service providers for IP firms, several other VoIP suppliers, including Twilio, Accent, DialPad, Phone.com, and RingCentral, have experienced disruptions throughout the past few days. 

While the fact that all those failures are linked to a service outage has not been established, one failure report specifically cites Bandwidth while the others say an upstream provider is implicated. "While we have mitigated much-intended harm, we know some of you have been significantly impacted by this event. For that, I am truly sorry. You trust us with your mission-critical communications. There is nothing this team takes more seriously," Morken said. 

The firm continues to monitor the circumstance with the network services and technical teams and actively engages with the customers to deal with any questions. The company mentioned that they’re going to post updates to status.bandwidth.com because they have further information to provide.

Since the statement was issued, the firm updated the details of a number of incoming and outgoing calling services with partial outages. 

On its Cloud Service Status page, Accent said on Tuesday that the "upstream provider continues to acknowledge the DDoS attack has returned to their network however we are seeing a very limited impact to inbound calling for our services." 

"Mitigation steps are being put in place to route inbound phone numbers around the upstream carrier the impact to service grows. We will continue to monitor the situation and update the status as appropriate," Accent wrote. 

Further, on Monday, a source said that their clients were experiencing serious issues with their migrated phone lines. The firm is the downstream retailer of Bandwidth hosted products and claimed that because of the bandwidth problem, they knew major telecoms company that "was in emergency mode".

Considering VoIP services are usually routed through the internet and necessitate public access to their servers and endpoints, they are indeed the main targets for DDoS extortion. Hackers would be overwhelmed by the transmission of more queries than possible to carry out these DDoS assaults, and the targeted devices and servers will not be available to everyone else. 

"Bandwidth continues to experience a DDoS attack which is intermittently impacting our services. Our network operations and engineering teams continue active mitigation efforts to protect our network," reads a screenshot shared on Reddit. 

Monday night, Bandwidth said that it had restored its services, although it was not apparent if threats were ceased or demands were fulfilled as asked by the actors. Nevertheless, it is usual for cybercriminals to stop attacks momentarily while pushing for extortion, while on Tuesday morning the DDoS attacks were resumed. 
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Outage
AAD Cyber Security Microsoft 365 Outage

Microsoft Cloud Users Hit by Global Outage

 

Microsoft has recognized a new change to an authentication system as a potential reason for a blackout that scourged clients of its cloud-based portfolio of productivity and back-office apps across the world. Client reports of technical problems with the software giant’s Microsoft 365 online productivity suite initially began arising around 7 pm on Monday 15 March 2021, as indicated by Downdetector's outage tracking data.

Microsoft updated its service health status page soon after and affirmed that clients might be encountering issues when attempting to get to the organization's key online collaboration, communication, and productivity tools. The organization proceeded to affirm that any service that depends on its cloud-based identity and access management service Azure Active Directory (AAD) might be affected. These incorporate the component services that make up Microsoft 365, like Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, however, admittance to the association's wider portfolio of cloud services was also affected by the issues. 

As affirmed on the Microsoft status page, clients of its public cloud platform Azure, its business intelligence software Dynamics 365, and the Microsoft Managed Desktop service are additionally known to have encountered access issues. The organization additionally distributed a progression of updates for clients during the incident by means of its social media channels. 

These incorporated an affirmation that a new update to an authentication system had been recognized as causing issues that could be affecting clients around the world. As confirmation of this, the organization affirmed around 9.17 pm on 15 March that it was carrying out a “mitigation worldwide” to address the issue, with a full "remediation" expected within 60 minutes of its deployment. 

“Service health has improved across multiple Microsoft 365 services,” said a post on the Microsoft 365 Twitter account. “However, we are taking steps to resolve some isolated residual impact for services that are still experiencing impact.” The organization on 16th March published a further update on Twitter saying that the incident seemed to have been largely resolved. “Our monitoring indicates that the majority of the services have fully recovered,” it said. “However, we’re addressing a subset of services that are still experiencing some residual impact and delays in recovery.”
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Technology
Apple Apple Devices iCloud iOS Outage Technology

Apple iCloud Outage Caused Setup Issues and Account Activation Failures


On December 25th, Apple users started facing issues in iCloud sign-in in the early morning. The outage that lasted for around 24 hours prevented users from setting up new Apple gadgets and devices; users experienced problems in the activation of Apple Watch, HomePod, iPhone along with several other devices. Reportedly, the problem was caused by an unspecified problem that occurred in Apple's iCloud backend. However, it was only a matter of a day before Apple resolved the issue by the evening of December 26th. 

The problem surfaced around 5 a.m. on the day of Christmas, making users wait longer than usual to relish the experience of their Apple product for Christmas. On Friday, while replying to a supposedly eager customer, Apple's support team tweeted acknowledging the customer's eagerness and indicating that the iCloud outage that lasted until Saturday was a result of the heightened demand experienced by the company.  

"We know your mom is eager to have everything working and appreciate you helping to set them up. We are experiencing a high capacity at this time which is impacting your ability to set up iCloud, please try back in a couple of hours," the tweet read. 

A lot of users upon noting the unusually long waiting time, some for as long as 32 hours and device activation failures reported the same on Twitter, while others said to have faced complete activation failures.  

Furthermore, certain users facing similar troubles reported their problem at forums.macrumors.com, "I realize it's Christmas morning and Apple's activation servers are probably on overload, but this still seems unnecessarily frustrating," BeatCrazy wrote.  

While explaining the issue in-depth, BeatCrazy further told, " I'm able to start the pairing process using my iPhone, sign into their Apple IDs with their passwords, but I keep getting hung when Apple wants me to enter the passcode of another device. I'm given options like their iPad passcodes, or one of my Macs. After entering any of these, the watch spins for about 2 minutes and I get the error "Verification Failed - There was an error verifying the passcode of your (or insert family member name here) iPhone (or insert iPad/Mac)." Apple gives me a choice to "reset encrypted data", which I take as an offer to destroy all their existing Apple ID passwords and data - not a good option IMO."  

Seemingly, due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the year's wrap and the holiday season is busier than usual for Apple, which delayed the release of its newest iPhone 12 series by a month.
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Technology
Microsoft Microsoft 365 Microsoft Azure Outage Shutdown Servers. Technology

Microsoft 365 Services Restored After Hours Long Outage


Recently Microsoft was hit with a massive global outage that interrupted users’ access to multiple services including Outlook.com, Office 365, Teams, Exchange, Azure, OneDrive Dynamics 365, SharePoint, amid other cloud-based services.

As per the Azure status history page, the users who were trying to access any of Microsoft’s services encountered issues with logging in and server connection as the downtime started around 21:25 UTC on Monday.


The service interruptions had a rather short lifetime, lasting for several hours before Microsoft technicians fixed the issue and successfully rolled back their systems on Tuesday.

In current times of global pandemic wherein physical access for people is restricted all over the world, the outage of online services has proven to be even more disruptive as the number of people relying on it for work and studies has sprung up by a remarkable margin. As classrooms moved online, students and educational institutions are heavily dependent on services offered by Microsoft and Google, primarily.

Giving insights on the matter, Microsoft said “Users who were not already authenticated to the cloud services using Azure AD would have seen multiple authentication request failures. The impact was primarily in the Americas based on the issue being exacerbated by load, but users in other regions may also have experienced some impact. Users that had previously authenticated prior to the issue may not have experienced any noticeable effect.”

Acknowledging the issue, Microsoft 365 Status said in a tweet, “we’ve received reports of users experiencing issues accessing their Exchange Online accounts via Outlook on the Web. Our initial investigation indicates that India-based users are primarily impacted audience. Further details can be found in your admin center under EX223208.”

“We took corrective actions to mitigate the impact to Exchange ActiveSync and have confirmed that service has been restored after users force a sync on their impacted devices. More information can be found under EX223053 in the admin portal.” Microsoft 365 Status said in another tweet.

The issues affecting Microsoft’s online authentication systems have been resolved by the company and the services are restored. Most users reported their system being fully recovered and services functioning normally again.
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Outage
Bank Cyber Security Bank Security Cyber Security Outage

Customers of Private Sector Banks Facing Problems in Net and Mobile Banking




Customers of several private sectors and well-known banks complained regarding encountering many issues in net and mobile banking in the course of the last few days, those of HDFC Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, and YES Bank are comprehended to have been most influenced by these 'outages'.

The issue, which made its appearance on the 1st of October, is by all accounts has been halfway settled, however numerous customers kept on facing certain issues while signing in to their accounts through the Internet and other apps.

While bank executives note that a mix of the festive season and the beginning of the month when salaries are credited just as some IT issue may have been the other reasons to have expanded the heap on servers. Following the restrictions at Punjab and Maharashtra Cooperative Bank, withdrawals had additionally increased after frenzy among certain depositors.

While the HDFC Bank, which is in the middle of a 'festive sale', appears to have briefly withdrawn an extra security feature for logging into net banking. Kotak Mahindra Bank's net banking page shows this message: “Due to high volume, you may experience some delay while accessing Net Banking. We will fix this soon. We regret any inconvenience caused.”

And at the same time, HDFC Bank spokesperson states that “Transactions through both net banking and mobile (app) banking have been very slow at times over the last couple of days, but they are going through. Though there isn’t nothing to be unduly worried about, we regret the inconvenience caused (to our customers)."

Nevertheless, the banks have guaranteed that they're making a decent attempt to resolve the issue and will ensure that the operations mentioned become, to a great extent, standardized at the earliest opportunity.
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WhatsApp
Facebook Fake messages Instagram Outage Social Media User Security WhatsApp

Fake Messages on WhatsApp Asks the Users to Pay Money in Order to Continue Using the App




WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram suffered a social media outage on 3rd July which affected the users all across the world. As a consequence of the outage, users were not able to access the platforms properly and certain features became dysfunctional. During the outage, a lot of people in India got messages on their WhatsApp telling that the app is down due to over usage and it would be off from 11:30 PM to 6:00 AM every day. The message also asked users to forward the text message to their contacts in order to continue using the app service otherwise their account would be made inaccessible and the app services will no longer be free of charge for them.

The fake message which was circulated on WhatsApp is as follows:

“What's app will b off From 11.30pm to 6:00 am daily Declared by central govt. Message from Narendra Modi (PM) we have had an over usage of user names on WhatsApp Messenger. We are requesting all users to forward this message to their entire contact list. If you do not forward this message, we will take it as your account is invalid and it will be deleted within the next 48 hours. DO NOT ignore my words or whatsapp will no longer recognise your activation. If you wish to re-activate your account after it has been deleted, a charge of 499.00 will be added to your monthly bill. We are also aware of the issue involving the pictures updates not showing. We are working diligently at fixing this problem and it will be up and running as soon as possible. Thank you for your cooperation from the modi team. WhatsApp is going to cost you money soon. The only way that it will stay free is if you are a frequent user i.e. you have at least 50 people you are chatting with. To become a frequent user send this message to 10 people who receive it (2 ticks) and your WhatsApp logo will change color. send this to 8 people to activate the new whatsapp..
Saturday morning whatsapp will become chargeable. If you have at least 10 contacts send them this message. In this way, we will see that you are an avid user and your logo will become blue and will remain free. (As discussed in the paper today. Whatsapp will cost 0.01€ per message. Send this message to 10 people. When you do the light will turn blue otherwise whatsapp will activate billing. ITS TRUE ...... U get blue TICKS"

Likewise, another fake message claimed that WhatsApp has been sold off to Mukesh Ambani and asks users to forward the message to 10 people in order to activate the new WhatsApp along with Facebook services.

The entire message read:
"Dont ignore please read it carefully" Hello, I. Am VARUN PULYANI director of whatsapp, this message is to inform all of our users that we have sold whatsapp to Mukesh Ambani . Reliance for 19 billion $. WhatsApp is now controlled by mukesh Ambani . If you have at least 10 contacts send this sms and logo of your whatsapp will change to a new icon with facebook's "f" within 24 hours.Forward this message to more than 10 people to activate your new whatsapp with Facebook services or else your account will be deleted from new servers.
This is the final notice! Hello everyone, it seems that all the warnings were real, the use of WhatsApp cost money from November 2017. If you send this string to 18 different on your list, your icon will be blue and will be free for you. If you do not believe me see tomorrow at 6 pm ending WhatsApp and have to pay to open it, this is by law This message is to inform all of our users, our servers have recently been very congested, so we are asking you to help us solve this problem. We require our active users to forward this message to each of the people in your contact list to confirm our active users using WhatsApp, if you do not send this message to all your contacts WhatsApp will then start to charge you. Your account will remain inactive with the consequence of losing all your contacts. Message from Jim Balsamic (CEO of Whatsapp ) we have had an over usage of user names on whatsapp Messenger. We are requesting all users to forward this message to their entire contact list. If you do not forward this message, we will take it as your account is invalid and it will be deleted within the next 48 hours. Please DO NOT ignore this message or whatsapp will no longer recognise your activation. If you wish to re-activate your account after it has been deleted, a charge of 25.00 will be added to your monthly bill. We are also aware of the issue involving the pictures updates not showing. We are working diligently at fixing this problem and it will be up and running as soon as possible. Thank you for your cooperation from the Whatsapp team”

Users are advised to not believe such fake messages and avoid spreading the misinformation further by forwarding it to other users.



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WhatsApp
Facebook Facebook messenger Instagram Outage Server Configuration WhatsApp

Facebook says outage was a result of incorrect server configuration

Facebook has said that a "server configuration change" was to blame for the worst outage in its history. Facebook and its apps Instagram, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp suffered outages for a considerable time on Thursday, affecting users for some 12 hours in most areas of the world, with the biggest impact in North America and Europe, according to the tracking website downdetector.com.

Facebook has only just offered an explanation for the problems it has experienced over the past 24 hours.

The company hasn't elaborated on what the server configuration change exactly meant nor has it said how many users were affected or why the outage took so long to fix. In a tweet, Facebook just apologised and thanked people for their patience. It said it had "triggered a cascading series of issues" for its platforms, including WhatsApp and Instagram.

"Yesterday, as a result of a server configuration change, many people had trouble accessing our apps and services," a Facebook tweet said. "We've now resolved the issues and our systems are recovering. We're very sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate everyone's patience."

The outage was believed to be the worst ever for the internet giant that reaches an estimated 2.7 billion people with its core social network, Instagram and messaging applications. It took the social network giant a full day from when the problems began to offer any explanation. It added that everything was now back to normal.

The outage brought fresh attention to the embattled social networking leader. It is yet another publicity problem for a company already dealing with privacy issues and regulatory probes.

The disruption isn’t likely to hurt advertisers much since they usually pay for ads per click or impression. But they lose potential customers who might have seen their ads when the site and apps were down. Longer term, Facebook’s reputation with advertisers and investors could be damaged, said Wedbush Securities managing director Dan Ives. It didn’t help that it took Facebook so long to explain what was going on, he said. Facebook said on Wednesday that the problem was not related to a “distributed denial of service” or DDoS attack, a type of attack that hackers use to interrupt service to a site, but didn’t provide any other details until Thursday. “In these situations, a lack of transparency is not a good look,” Ives said. “The longer something like this lasts, the more questions there are.”
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Outage
Facebook Gmail Google Google Drive Instagram Outage

Google Maps, Gmail, Drive, Facebook and Instagram Suffered Outage




Google addressed an influx of complaints it received from the users regarding the misbehavior of its popular services like Gmail, YouTube, and Google Drive among others. Users all across the world were troubled by the outage of the services they heavily rely upon for various day-to-day activities. 

Though the cause of the outage has not been confirmed, the issues of the users were addressed by Google.

Besides Google, Youtube has also received complaints by its users which it addressed on Twitter telling them that the platform is aware of the service disruption and the problems faced by its users. Alongside, YouTube assured the sufferers that it is already looking into the matter and will come up with a fix.

Notably, YouTubers and content creators were facing problems while uploading videos and viewers were unable to watch the videos smoothly.

Addressing the issues with Google Drive, the company said, “We’re investigating reports of an issue with Google Drive. We will provide more information shortly. The affected users are able to access Google Drive, but are seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior.”

Similarly, for Gmail, the company stated, we’re investigating reports of an issue with Gmail. We will provide more information shortly. The affected users are able to access Gmail but are seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior.

Furthermore, Google mentioned in its G Suite Status Dashboard that the issue has been rectified and the services, i.e., Gmail and Google Drive will be functioning properly soon.

“The problem with Google Drive 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.”

While acknowledging the disruptions faced by its Cloud Engine, Google said, “We are still seeing the increased error rate with Google App Engine Blobstore API. Our Engineering Team is investigating possible causes. Mitigation work is currently underway by our Engineering Team. We will provide another status update by Tuesday, 2019-03-12 20:45 US/Pacific with current details.”

On the other hand, Facebook was down for more than 14 hours due to which millions of users across the globe were denied access to the platform. It was on Thursday morning, Facebook along with its associated apps seemed to be regaining operational status.

While Facebook is yet to provide an explanation for the services being disrupted, it said, "We're aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps,"
"We're working to resolve the issue as soon as possible."

Being fallen prey to the same crisis, the issues faced by Instagram users included not being able to refresh the feed and other glitches while accessing the content.

Commenting on the matter, Elizabeth Warren, a potential Democratic candidate in the next US presidential election, said in a statement to New York Times, "We need to stop this generation of big tech companies from throwing around their political power to shape the rules in their favor and throwing around their economic power to snuff out or buy up every potential competitor."







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