Facebook Says Hour-Long Global Outage Was Its Own Fault, Not The Work Of Hackers

(cousinmacho)

After Facebook and Instagram went down around the world for about an hour earlier today, the social media giant announced that despite the claims of hackers on Twitter, it’s placing the blame squarely on itself, saying it was a self-inflicted outage.

Facebook users from Asia, the United States, Australia and Instagram users in the the U.K. reported not being able to access the sites for about an hour today, reports the Associated Press, and Facebook says its all Facebook’s fault.

“This was not the result of a third party attack but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems,” its statement said, calling it a “major outage” on its developer site that lasted an hour.

An organization called Lizard Squad which claimed responsibility for a recent hack on Malaysia airlines claimed it was responsible for the outages, but security experts point to Facebook’s story as a more likely scenario.

A denial-of-service attacked would’ve made those sites unreachable rather than accessible but displaying an error message, one security consultant told the AP. Because of Facebook’s multiple data centers, an attack would’ve affected only one region, instead of the global reach of this outage.

Anyway, get back to Facebooking and Instagramming all that snow, people on the East Coast. The rest of you, get back to asking your friends about all that snow on social media.

Hourlong global outage at Facebook, Instagram blamed on internal glitch [Associated Press]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist