FRANKFURT (Web Desk) – 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, which goes by the name Lizard Squad, 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.
A Twitter account that purports to speak for the hacker group posted messages suggesting that it was behind an attack that temporarily blocked several major web sites, including Facebook and Instagram.
“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, adding, “Both services are back to 100 per cent for everyone.”
Users in the United States and many countries in Asia, including India, and Europe reported that they were unable to log on to the websites of Facebook, Instagram and corresponding mobile apps including Facebook Messenger from around 11:30 am. Services were restored within an hour of going down, users reported.
During the outages, users of the social networking website 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.”
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 in December 2014.
