[UPDATED] Dropbox was taken down by hackers last night, back up now

Andre Yoskowitz
11 Jan 2014 10:00

Late last night, the website for Dropbox was taken down, potentially by hackers, although it is back up now.
Dropbox released a statement saying the downtime was due to "routine internal maintenance," but the hacker group 'The 1775 Sec' had already taken claim on Twitter minutes before the site went down. They claim it was done to honor the late developer and activist Aaron Swartz who killed himself a year ago following an extended trial against him by the U.S. government that many called a "witch hunt."
1775 Sec followed up their original tweets by saying they were giving Dropbox time to resolve known vulnerabilities in the site before they dump the database.
They later laughed off the tweet about the database dump, claiming they had just performed a DDoS attack and nothing else.

BREAKING NEWS: We have just compromised the @Dropbox Website http://t.co/HqnsZOLSXR
#hacked
#compromised

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

We are literally choking on laughter! We DDoS attacked #DropBox. Claiming its a data breach! This is so ducking funny?

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

UPDATE: Dropbox has denied wholeheartedly that "External Factors" led to the downtime.

Dropbox site is back up! Claims of leaked user info are a hoax. The outage was caused during internal maintenance. Thanks for your patience!

— Dropbox (@Dropbox) January 11, 2014