Facebook outage: It was us, not hackers, says Facebook

Facebook and Instagram were both offline Tuesday morning in the UK for about an hour, but the social network says the break was not caused by hackers.

The one-hour outage affected Facebook's 1.3 billion users and the 300 million on Facebook's photo-sharing website Instagram from 22.10pm Pacific Standard Time (or 6.10am Greenwich Mean Time), according to Facebook's network status page.

Speculation on the cause of the fault immediately turned pirate after hackers Lizard Squad Group tweet which read: "Facebook, Instagram, Amadou, AIM, HipChat #offline #LizardSquad."

The group also claimed responsibility yesterday for an attack on Malaysia Airlines website and was behind the failure to Sony PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Microsoft Christmas.

However, Facebook issued a statement denying the TechCrunch failure was caused by foreigners and explaining it was an internal matter.

"It was not the result of a third attack, but occurred after we introduced a change that has affected our configuration systems," said Facebook.

According to the note to developers, server API Instagram and Facebook were also down, causing a ripple effect for applications that rely on the Facebook API. As with the other sites that were down, as Amadou dating site and application in AIM chat, their failure to sign seemed to be linked with Facebook.

According to a security expert, rapid admission of Facebook as its own engineers were responsible for the failure demonstrates how companies became nervous about cyber attacks, especially when they affect key communications networks.

"It's a sign of nervousness caused by the increasing number successful cyber attacks on major online brands that Facebook quickly issued a denial that the incident was a cyber attack. It is better to try a cock in their own blame staff an outside group, "said Alan Woodward, a professor in the computer science department at the University of Surrey who specializes in computer security.

"Perhaps one of the most extraordinary aspects of this failure is panic 40 minutes it seemed cause among its users. Other social media was almost immediately complete user openly wonder how they manage without access to Facebook. This is almost as if social media has become part of our critical infrastructure, but I hope people will realize that it's just a social network, " he said.

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