It Was Facebook Behind Facebook Outages Today
Facebook and its photo-sharing site Instagram were blocked around the world for up to an hour today, which happened due to an internal fault and not an outside attack.
A hacker group associated with other recent high-profile attacks on other online services sought to claim responsibility for the outages, but Facebook said the fault was its own, Reuters reported.
"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, according to Reuters. "Both services are back to 100 percent for everyone."
Other than Facebook and Instagram, dating app Tinder and workplace instant messaging service Hipchat were also down around the same time, but have since recovered.
"If you run a service with the capacity (and complexity) to deliver media for hundreds of millions of users, it's inevitable that things don't always go according to plan," said Steve Santorelli, a former London police detective and now a researcher at U.S. threat intelligence firm Team Cymru, according to Reuters.
A group of unknown hackers called The Lizard Squad tried to take the responsibility of the outages by tweeting and suggested that it would have attacked Twitter, too, "if only we didn't use twitter to communicate..."
