Dropbox Suffers Downtime, But Not Hacked, Vendor Says

Dropbox suffered an outage over the weekend that the company stated was due to internal maintenance. In the midst of it all, hacker group The 1775 Sec claimed responsibility for launching a DDoS attack on the popular file sync and share site, even going so far as to claim it had swiped data.

It appears that at least the data breach claim was merely a hoax, but the damage to Dropbox's reputation has been done. Reports of the breach circulated around the Twitterverse and into the media.

If it had been true, it wouldn't have been the first time Dropbox had suffered a data breach because of hackers, but in this case, The 1775 Sec was playing a hoax. No data breach occurred over the weekend. The 1775 Sec has admitted the hoax on Twitter, but still claims it successfully brought Dropbox down via a DDoS attack.

No matter the cause, the outage was significant. Dropbox went down on Friday evening. In a blog post, Dropbox admitted the outage at 6:40 p.m. (all times Pacific). Although a 8:36 p.m. update noted the cloud service was back up and running, Dropbox continued to suffer through outage problems up until yesterday.

According to Dropbox, by 4:10 a.m. on Jan. 12, more than 99 percent of users were able to access their Dropbox files. Some features, including the photos tab, were still experiencing issues. At 1:59 p.m., Dropbox noted that 5 percent of users were still experiencing syncing problems from the desktop client. Approximately 20 percent were still experiencing difficulties access Dropbox through mobile apps.

Dropbox stated that no files were lost during the outage, and the company was planning to roll out changes to "improve things for those users."

Update: Dropbox posted additional information about its outage last night, noting the cause of the service outage followed a "routine server upgrade" that began on Friday night. A bug brought down several active servers, which eventually brought down Dropbox entirely. The Dropbox team wrote that "no hacking or DDoS attack was involved."