Facebook denies hacking to blame for global outage that affected millions

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Facebook denies hacking to blame for global outage that affected millions

PUBLISHED : Tuesday, 27 January, 2015, 4:05pm
UPDATED : Tuesday, 27 January, 2015, 6:44pm

Reuters in Frankfurt, Associated Press

Facebook was down for some 40 minutes, driving social media users to vent on Twitter. Photo: Reuters

Facebook, the world’s largest social network, and its Instagram photo-sharing site, suffered temporary outages around the world for up to an hour on Tuesday and the company said later that an internal software networking error was to blame.

The outage at Facebook appeared to spill over and temporarily slow or block traffic to other major internet sites, according to web and mobile user reports from around the globe.

A hacker group associated with other recent high-profile attacks sought to take credit for the outages, but Facebook denied in a statement that any outside party was responsible.

“This was not the result of a third-party attack but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems,” the Facebook statement said. “Both services are back to 100 per cent for everyone.”

Users in the United States and many countries in Asia and Europe reported that they were unable to log on to the websites of Facebook, Instagram and corresponding mobile apps including Facebook and Facebook Messenger from around 0600 GMT. Services were restored within an hour of going down, users reported.

During the outages, Facebook users were greeted with the message: “Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.”

A Twitter account that purports to speak for hacker group “Lizard Squad” posted messages suggesting that it was behind an attack that temporarily blocked several major web sites, including Facebook and Instagram.

The Lizard Squad is a group of unknown hackers that has taken credit for several high-profile outages, including the attacks that took down the Sony PlayStation Network and Microsoft’s Xbox Live network last month.

Facebook suffered a widespread outage lasting roughly 40 minutes today, affecting millions of users in the United States, Asia, Britain and Australia.

The social media giant’s Instagram service was also briefly inaccessible.

A South Korea public relations company that represents Facebook said the company was “working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible”.

It did not explain what caused the outage.

But some reports pointed to a hacking group responsible for taking down Malaysia Airlines' website as possibly taking credit for the massive outage.

A Twitter account that purports to speak for hacker group "Lizard Squad" posted messages suggesting that it was behind an attack the temporarily blocked several major web sites.

Facebook has about 1.25 billion users and Instagram has some 300 million.

News of the Facebook outage set rival social network Twitter alight. It comes ahead of Facebook reporting its quarterly earnings on Wednesday.

As access to Facebook returned in Asia, some users reported that the site was loading or responding slowly.

The temporary loss of service may be Facebook’s biggest outage since September 24, 2010, when it was down for about 2.5 hours.