Facebook, the world’s largest online social network, and its Instagram image-sharing site, experienced temporary outages around the world for up to an hour yesterday. The company later said it was caused by an internal software networking error.
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 statement said. “Both services are back to 100 percent for everyone.”
Users in the US and many nations in Asia and Europe reported that they were unable to log on to the Web sites of Facebook, Instagram and corresponding mobile apps, including Facebook and Facebook Messenger, beginning at about 6am GMT.
Services were restored within an hour of going down, users reported.
A Twitter account that purports to speak for purported 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 thought to be a group of unknown hackers and 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.
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