Dropbox Goes Offline Reportedly Due To Hacking In Honor Of Aaron Swartz

Mere moments ago, Dropbox went offline, resulting in the popular cloud storage service's inaccessibility both on the Web and on its mobile apps. The company stated that the shutdown originated internally, but a certain hacking group claimed otherwise. On its status homepage and its tech blog, Dropbox attributed the outage to an issue that arose during routine internal maintenance:

We are aware that the Dropbox site is currently down. This was caused during routine internal maintenance, and was not caused by external factors. We are working to fix this as soon as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Apparently, though, the issue was caused by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack from a group of hackers called 1775 Sec.

Laughing our asses off: We DDoS attacked #DropBox. The site was down how exactly were we suppose to get the Database? Lulz

— The 1775 Sec (@1775Sec) January 11, 2014

The group admitted that its attack on Dropbox was of that type, but not after trolling the media with its initial claim that the service's database had been compromised. The group even "leaked" a portion of the database, which ultimately turned out to be part of a hoax pulled by the hackers in honor of the first anniversary of Internet activist Aaron Swartz.

Hackers @1775Sec DDoS attacks http://t.co/QCuRJL3hm4 And then goes on to Troll the Media & members of Anonymous, in the name of Aaron Swartz

— Anonymous Priest (@YourAnonPriest) January 11, 2014

At any rate, Dropbox has restored its normal operations. And now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

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