Facebook outage "not the result of a third party attack"

SINGAPORE — Users worldwide were unable to log on to two of the world’s largest social networks, Facebook and Instagram, for close to an hour today (Jan 27). The sites and their applications reportedly went offline at about 2.10pm Singapore time.

Both sites could be accessed again just after 3pm, Singapore time.

Earlier, a Twitter account that claims to speak for hacker group "Lizard Squad" posted messages suggesting that it was behind an attack that temporarily blocked several major web sites, Reuters reported. 

Facebook commented on the outage stating: “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.”

Instagram had tweeted that it was aware of the outage: “We’re aware of an outage affecting Instagram and are working on a fix. Thank you for your patience.” Facebook directed users to a page that said "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on it and we'll get it fixed as soon as we can." 

Facebook has about 1.35 billion active users and Instagram has some 300 million. The temporary loss of service may be Facebook's biggest outage since Sept 24, 2010 when it was down for about 2.5 hours.

Many users turned to Twitter with and the hashtags #facebookdown and #SocialMeltdown2015surfacing.

Some have responded with humour. The Singapore Civil Defence Force tweeted: “Facebook and Instagram might be done, but this is definitely not an emergency. #995ForEmergenciesOnly”

WITH AGENCIES