Self-Inflicted Wound Causes Hour-Long Facebook, Instagram Outage
It's a good thing Facebook was only out of commission for an hour, otherwise can you imagine the uproar that would have erupted from the hundreds of millions of daily active users who would have to find some place else to post their pictures of dinner or political rants? Instagram wasn't an option, because that was also down -- both self inflicted wounds, Facebook says.
"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 percent for everyone," Facebook told USA Today.
Facebook called it a "major outage" on its developers page, confirming that both the social network and Instagram had been out of commission from 10:10 PM to 11:10 PM PST. According to the status update, Facebook's engineers were able to quickly identify and fix the problem, with no further breaks in service expected.
Facebook's expanded statement came after the ornery hacking group known as Lizard Squad hinted on Twitter that it might be responsible for the outage. However, it doesn't appear that was the case.
The outage, though relatively short, was long enough to spawn a hashtag on Twitter, with #Facebookdown trending last night. You can even order a related t-shirt.
"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 percent for everyone," Facebook told USA Today.
Facebook called it a "major outage" on its developers page, confirming that both the social network and Instagram had been out of commission from 10:10 PM to 11:10 PM PST. According to the status update, Facebook's engineers were able to quickly identify and fix the problem, with no further breaks in service expected.
Facebook's expanded statement came after the ornery hacking group known as Lizard Squad hinted on Twitter that it might be responsible for the outage. However, it doesn't appear that was the case.
The outage, though relatively short, was long enough to spawn a hashtag on Twitter, with #Facebookdown trending last night. You can even order a related t-shirt.
Meanwhile at Facebook HQ #facebookdown pic.twitter.com/gFhI32T4Qq
— 9GAG (@9GAG) January 27, 2015It's good to see the Internet hasn't lost its collective sense of humor.
