CLOUD STORAGE FIRM SAYS ROUTINE MAINTENANCE CAUSED RECENT OUTAGE
Dropbox has denied its weekend outage was caused by hackers or a distributeddenial-of-service (DDoS) attack, saying all user data was safe. The cloud-storage service went offline on Friday evening for three hours, although Dropbox admitted some users saw intermittent issues throughout the weekend.
The service should be fully back up and running for all users, the company said, although it said issues remain with the Dropbox photos tab. At the time of the outage, hacking groups Anonymous and 1775 Sec both claimed responsibility, with reports suggesting the attack was somehow connected to the anniversary of the death of internet activist Aaron Swartz.
However, Dropbox said reports of a hack were a “hoax”, and the real cause was an OS upgrade to some servers. “Unfortunately, a bug installed this upgrade on several active servers, which brought down the entire service,” said Aditya Agarwal, vice-president of engineering, in a post on the Dropbox blog. “Your files were always safe, and despite some reports, no hacking or DDoS attack was involved.” Head of infrastructure Akhil Gupta further explained that the upgrade script checks to make sure there’s no active data on servers before installing a new OS, but a “subtle bug” led to active machines being reinstalled.
“Your files were never at risk during the outage,” Dropbox added. “These databases do not contain file data. We use them to provide some of our features (for example, photo album sharing, camera uploads, and some API features).” Agarwal apologised for the downtime, saying it was “unacceptable”, and saying Dropbox was investing in more “tools and checks” to avoid a similar situation in the future, including an additional layer of checks to the state of machines before running updates and a new tool to increase recovery times.
