Facebook not hacked: server error takes social network offline

Multiple major social networks went down on Tuesday morning, including Facebook, Tinder, Instagram, AOL Instant Messenger, and Hipchat.

The cause of the suspension, which began around 6:20am GMT and ended about 50 minutes later, was an apparent outage at Facebook’s HQ which cascaded to other networks that use Facebook to authenticate users.

Facebook told the Guardian: “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 outage hit both the websites and apps of the affected services all around the world. Facebook-owned Instagram returned a “can’t refresh feed” error, while the Facebook website itself simply failed to resolve in the browser.

Facebook’s failure seemed to be so major that it has cascaded into apps such as Tinder that rely on the social network for login functionality.

Not every Facebook-owned service failed. WhatsApp, acquired by Mark Zuckerberg’s company in February 2014, remained functional.

Hacker group Lizard Squad - which attacked PlayStation and Xbox Live networks at Christmas - had tweeted the outages and were incorrectly reported as the cause by some media outlets.

The group’s tweets stopped short of specifically claiming credit for the failures.

The last major outage to affect Facebook occurred in June last year, where a similar technical issue took the site offline for more than 30 minutes. Publishers, among others, saw referral traffic from Facebook fall off a cliff – a similar but greater affect is expected from today’s outage.