WASHINGTON: Facebook and its Instagram photo-sharing site were interrupted temporarily on Tuesday, provoking panic, rumours of a hack, and jokes of how more than one billion users were struggling to cope.
“This was not the result of a third-party attack,” Facebook said in a statement after its services were restored.
The outage “occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems”, it added.
The breakdown, around 1715 AEDT on Tuesday reportedly lasted an hour and hit users in Australia, the US, Europe and Asia, with both sites showing error messages.
With users disabled from posting selfies or the latest details of their personal lives, many rushed to Twitter to complain and joke, with “#facebookdown” and “#SocialMeltdown2015” rapidly trending.
Some joked about how they had been able to read real books during the enforced social media pause.
Some suggested that hacking group Lizard Squad had been responsible for the outage, after a tweet on the group’s Twitter account readReports said Tinder, AIM, Hipchat and MySpace had also been affected.
Lizard Squad has claimed to be behind a series hacks of Microsoft and Sony gaming networks over Christmas.
The group also claimed an attack on the website of Malaysia Airlines on Monday, referencing the Islamic State jihadists and threatening to expose data taken from the carrier’s servers.
But analysts downplayed the likelihood that Lizard Squad was responsible.
“It’s in their interest to claim the Facebook breakdown even if it’s not true because that gives them a communications boost,” Gerome Billois, an expert in cybercrime at IT consulting firm Solucom, told AFP.
“But the main internet players usually say if they’ve suffered an attack which affected their services.”
Facebook “wouldn’t take the risk of denying that kind of information”, said Jerome Robert, from the Lexsi computer emergency response team.
“As for Lizard Squad, their tweet is not really a claim of responsibility. They certainly have notched up some victories, but nothing at Facebook’s level.”
Facebook has more than 1.35 billion active users each month.
More than 80 per cent of its daily active users are outside the US and Canada.
