Dropbox suffers outage, denies it was hacked

PanARMENIAN.Net - Dropbox service returned Friday, Jan 10 night, after an outage of several hours that the file-sharing service blamed on an issue that came up during regular maintenance, PCWorld reports.

A social network post allegedly from a hacker group had claimed responsibility for the outage, but Dropbox dismissed claims that user info had been leaked as hoax.

Users trying access the Dropbox website from around 6 pm to 8 pm PT were redirected to a status page acknowledging the outage. “We are aware of an issue currently affecting the Dropbox site,” a message posted on the site said. “We have identified the cause, which was the result of an issue that arose during routine internal maintenance, and are working to fix this as soon as possible.”

The main page of the Dropbox site returned by 8 pm PT, but attempts to log in produced an error message. Just after 8:30 pm PT, Dropbox posted via Twitter that service had been restored. “Dropbox site is back up! Claims of leaked user info are a hoax. The outage was caused during internal maintenance. Thanks for your patience!”

Before tweeting that restored service, Dropbox denied to several tech sites on Friday night that it had been hacked, again citing internal maintenance issues as the culprit.