Disaster over for Facebook addicts, the social network has resumed normal service after an hour of downtime. Facebook didn’t say what caused the “major outage”. Update: The company has now said the outage wasn’t a result of a third party attack — hacker group Lizard Squad claimed credit earlier. Here’s the Facebook statement:
Earlier this evening 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.
Gather yourselves and your loved ones, important news incoming… both Facebook and Instagram are down right now.
It isn’t clear what’s keeping two of the world’s most popular social networks offline at this point, but WhatsApp — the chat app that is also owned by Facebook — is online, which suggests that there isn’t a total outage at Menlo Park.
One significant repercussion is that the outage is affecting apps that rely on Facebook for user log-in, such as Tinder.
Hipchat and AIM are among others suffering from this issue, which some are suggesting was triggered by a DDOS attack.
The unofficial rules of online publishing probably mean that Facebook will come back online right after I publish this post, but — in the event that this doesn’t happen — why turn not to another social network, open a book, strike up a conversation with someone in person, go outside (unless you are in New York)… etc, you get the idea.
PS: Thanks to everyone who emailed in about this, take the rest of the day off as thanks.