Dropbox suffers outage, with reports of email address leaks at the same time

Yesterday at around 3pm ET many Dropbox users in The Netherlands, Germany, and the UK reported on the Dropbox forums that they could not sign into the service and that they were receiving spam from online gambling sites. The company declined to comment, but a forum user who also identified himself as an employee said Dropbox was investigating the reports.

A few hours later krebsonsecurity.com reported that Dropbox had issued a statement on the matter:

We‘re aware that some Dropbox users have been receiving spam to email addresses associated with their Dropbox accounts. Our top priority is investigating this issue thoroughly and updating you as soon as we can. We know it’s frustrating not to get an update with more details sooner, but please bear with us as our investigation continues.

In a second statement a few hours ago, a Dropbox employee confirmed that the outage was coincidental:

We wanted to update everyone about spam being sent to email addresses associated with some Dropbox accounts. We continue to investigate and our security team is working hard on this. We’ve also brought in a team of outside experts to make sure we leave no stone unturned.
 
While we haven’t had any reports of unauthorized activity on Dropbox accounts, we’ve taken a number of precautionary steps and continue to work around the clock to make sure your information is safe. We’ll continue to provide updates.
 
We also want to let you know that the dropbox.com site outage this afternoon (from 12:35 to 12:55 PDT) was incidental and not caused by any external factor or third party.
 
Joe

Not all Dropbox users were affected in the targeted countries.