Facebook Denies Hackers Caused Outage

Facebook has said a technical fault, not hackers, was the cause of an outage that downed its own site and those of several services it owns on Tuesday morning.

The outage, which left millions of users around the world unable to access Facebook, mobile photo sharing app Instagram and dating app Tinder, began at around 6 a.m. GMT on Tuesday morning and reportedly affected users in the US, Europe and Asia for between 40 minutes and an hour.

‘No third-party attack’

Instagram is owned by Facebook, while Tinder depends upon Facebook for its services.

Hacker group Lizard Squad had issued a Twitter message referencing the outage, leading some to speculate it was responsible, but Facebook denied this was the case.

“This was not the result of a third-party attack but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems,” Facebook said in a statement. “We moved quickly to fix the problem, and both services are back to 100 percent for everyone.”

User reaction

Some users took to rival social media site Twitter to comment on the outage.

“I hope you all took advantage of the 35 second Facebook outage to Like a person in real life,” wrote South African media commentator Arthur Goldstuck.

Lizard Squad took credit for defacing the website of Malaysia Airlines over the weekend and on Tuesday promised to publish data allegedly stolen from the site. The airline denies user data was affected.

The hacker group also said it was responsible for outages affecting the online gaming networks of Sony and Microsoft over Christmas.

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