An outage which affected Facebook apps and developer accounts this week was caused by over-zealous attempts to disable malicious apps, the social network has admitted. The outage, which locked app developers out of their accounts, was caused by an attempted “purge” of malicious apps.
Facebook’s
Eugene Zarakhovsky admitted in a blog post that the outage was due to an attempt to find and disable malicious apps, saying, “The Facebook Platform and our users are constantly under attack from malicious apps and we have many automated systems to protect the platform and our users. Occasionally we detect an attack that requires us to augment those automated systems. Specifically, we identify a malicious pattern, find all the apps that match that pattern, and then disable those apps.”
