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Facebook
and Instagram have denied their services were hacked today, blaming a 40-minute
outage on an internal systems issue, PA reports.
The
sites were unavailable across the world earlier today, with a hacking group
appearing to claim responsibility for the outage.
A
spokesman for Facebook, which owns Instagram, said: "Earlier today many
people had trouble accessing Facebook and Instagram. This was not the result of
a third party attack but instead occurred after we introduced a change that
affected our configuration systems.
"We
moved quickly to fix the problem, and both services are back to 100% for
everyone."
The
technical problems affected some other apps, including online dating service
Tinder, which rely on Facebook servers to work.
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A
hacking group called Lizard Squad, which has previously claimed responsibility
for bringing down online services, posted a message on Twitter this morning
appearing to link itself to the outage.
It
said: "Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, AIM, Hipchat #offline
#LizardSquad".
Social
media users, who were relieved to still be able to access Twitter, shared their
complaints about the outage.
Scarlett
Moffat, from the Channel 4 show Gogglebox, tweeted: "What Instagram and
Facebook are down!! But how will I know what your morning Starbucks looks
like."
Twitter
user Vince Caso said: "Livetweeting is my last comfort. It is so difficult
to judge people in 140 characters. I miss Facebook."
Fortune
Feimster commented: "Facebook and Instagram are back up! Everyone can get
out of their foetal position."
Andrew
Pope, an engineer at Facebook, posted on to the Facebook Developer's website to
alert app creators to the "major outage" which he said lasted up to
an hour between around 6.10am and 7.10am.
"Our
engineers identified the cause of the outage and recovered the site
quickly," he wrote.
"Thank
you for your patience.
"We
are sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused you and the users of your
apps."
Later
Facebook wrote in a statement that the engineers had managed to identify the cause
of the outage and “recovered the site quickly.”
Facebook,
launched on February 4, 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, now has 864 million daily
active users, according to information from Facebook newsroom, September 2014. It also
has about 1.35 billion monthly active subscribers.
Instagram,
an online photo-sharing, video-sharing and social networking service, was
launched October 6, 2010, and since then it has garnered more than 150 million
monthly active users.
A
Facebook spokesman said in a statement emailed to CNBC that the outage "was
not the result of a third party attack but …occurred after we introduced a
change that affected our configuration systems."
“We moved quickly to fix
the problem, and both services are back to 100 percent for everyone.”
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