Mikah SargentCloud storage service Dropbox went down Friday evening, and the reason behind the outage is, well, a bit cloudy.
During the outage, the Dropbox site was down and users had trouble connecting to the server through the desktop application.
While Dropbox claims the outage "was caused during routine internal maintenance, and was not caused by external factors," hacker group 1775 Sec says it's behind the outage, tweeting: "We have just compromised the Dropbox website."
According to 9to5mac, the group claims it launched a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack on Dropbox in honor of Internet activist Aaron Swartz. Swartz committed suicide one year ago as of Jan. 11. (Via Flickr / Fred Benenson)
The group even tweeted a link to data it claims comes from the Dropbox database.
But the cloud storage company says the leak is a hoax and the group simply used the site's downtime as an opportunity to claim it attacked Dropbox's services.
In a response to TechCrunch, Dropbox says the data 1775 Sec posted on Twitter is actually from a security breach of another website.
"In regards to claims of 'leaked user information' – this is a hoax. This is not Dropbox data. The list was published 12/9/13."
So Dropbox is sticking to its guns, saying the outage happened during routine maintenance. And the hacker group is sticking to its guns, continuing to tweet about how the media got it all wrong and the group's DDoS attack took down the site.
Although some publications have flat-out discredited the attack, others are suggesting there isn't enough evidence to deny the group's claims. So — routine maintenance or an attack? Let us know what you think.
