The Philippine Online Chronicles

Intermittent Facebook outages yesterday fueled rumors of an impeding attack on the service by the internet activists, Anonymous.

Earlier this week, a video inviting the public to join in hitting the social network with a massive distributed denial-of-service attack was shared by several tech websites, sparking rumors. Improbable reasons to attack Facebook include their late anti-SOPA sentiment and the impending forced implementation of the privacy-invading Timeline feature.

However, this was quickly denied by AnonOps, a source regarded as the “official” representative of Anonymous on Twitter: “Again we must say that we will not attack Facebook! Again the mass media lie,” the tweet reads.

Rumors regarding an Anonymous attack on Facebook also occurred last year. Apparently scheduled for 5th November 2011, these rumors were denied by both AnonOps and GroupAnon, another credible Twitter account. No such attack took place.

Facebook responded in a statement: "We expect Anonymous just like we expect any other attack on any other day. Due to our size, we face the same threats as seen everywhere else on the Web, but we have developed partnerships, backend systems, and protocols to confront the full range of security challenges we face. Facebook has always been committed to protecting our users' information, and we will continue to innovate and work tirelessly to defend this data."

Anonymous has been busy lately in the wake of the SOPA protests and the Megaupload arrests, taking down the sites of various US government agencies and media organizations last week. Their efforts appear to be currently focused on ACTA, an international treaty greater in scope than SOPA.