WASHINGTON: Facebook and Instagram, the social networking websites popular with users across the world, are now working again after experiencing technical difficulties.
Facebook said on its website it was working to resolve the issues which left many forced to use Twitter to share opinions, selfies and more. Users found they could not use the social networking websites or apps.
Hacking group Lizard Squad claimed responsibility for what looked to be an attack on Facebook’s server on Tuesday. It also warned that they would soon release a tranche of emails from the offices of Malaysia Airlines.
When attempting to access Facebook, users were told: “Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.”
AP reported earlier in the morning that Facebook, which owns the Instagram service, was “aware of outage and is working on a fix”.
According to the news agency, the outage lasted for 40 minutes and users in United States, Asia and Australia were affected. This is the longest period the company’s website has been down since September 2010.
At that time, the outage lasted more than two hours and Facebook described it on their website as “the worst outage we’ve had in over four years”.
Experts suggest Tinder may not been hacked, but was taken out as side effect of a potential attack on Facebook as the dating site connects to Facebook profiles to operate.
Facebook had 1.25 billion monthly active users at the end of September and 864 million daily active users on average.
Even the prime minister of Finland found himself using Twitter after discovering Instagram and Facebook were down among other users – within a short period, #facebookdown was trending on Twitter worldwide
