Facebook Claims Service Disruption Was Due To Internal Changes - Not Hacking

Effectually 1PM Eastern Fourth dimension today, several social networking and sharing services went offline. The downtime lasted for effectually twoscore minutes, after which the companies responded promptly and services were resumed to normal. Targets of the set on include social networking giant Facebook, matchmaking site Tinder, moving-picture show sharing Instagram and piece of work conversation site Hipchat also saw their networks go down in an attack that's seeing a fleck of confusion every bit to what its origins are.

Big Scale Disruption Of Several Online Networks Causes Mild Panic

News of the disruption began to spread as soon as users began to experience their services slowing down. Tinder was the first to start panicking, with a tweet on the site's twiiter reading "EVERYBODY PANIC! #Blizzard? North korea? #TindernetApocalypse" Yet, those with worries about their online matches disappearing were soon reassured as the site began functioning every bit normal soon later.

Facebook being downwards, as usual too caused an uproar on twitter, with #facebookdown becoming the top trending topics of the 24-hour interval. Although initially silent, the visitor presently issued a statement maxim that the company had managed to track downward the issue of the disruption and that'southward its engineers were working to fix the problem. Facebook resumed services at around 11:16 ET.

Looking to perhaps cash in on the disruption's notoriety, infamous hacker group Cadger Squad soon claimed responsibility for the disruption. The group has been responsible for attacks on Sony'southward PlayStation and Microsoft's Xbox Live networks, the most infamous of which was perhaps this Christmas' downing of their servers. Earlier, Lizard Squad was under the spotlight after the group claimed responsibility for an attack on Malaysia Airline's website. Facebook however denied the grouping's claims, according to a company spokesperson who claimed ""This was not the result of a third political party attack but instead occurred afterward we introduced a change that afflicted our configuration systems. We moved speedily to fix the problem, and both services are back to 100 percent for everyone," in an email to CNBC.