Access to Facebook, the world’s largest social network, and its
Instagram photo-sharing site were blocked around the world for up to an
hour on Tuesday, which the company said later was due to an internal
fault and not an outside attack.
The outage at Facebook, which started around 0600 GMT, appeared to
spill over and temporarily slow or block traffic to other major Internet
sites, according to web and mobile user reports from around the globe.
U.S.-based online match-making site Tinder, a unit of IAC/InterActive
Corp, and Hipchat, the workplace instant- messaging service of
Australian enterprise software company Atlassian, were also down around
the same period, but recovered.
A hacker group associated with other recent high-profile attacks on
other online services sought to claim responsibility for the outages,
but Facebook said the fault was its own.
“This was not the result of a third-party attack but instead occurred
after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems,”
Facebook said. “Both services are back to 100 percent for everyone.”
Users in the United States and many countries in Asia and Europe
reported that they were unable to log on to the websites of Facebook,
Instagram and corresponding mobile apps including Facebook and Facebook
Messenger.
During the outages, Facebook users were greeted with the message:
“Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed
as soon as we can.”
“If you run a service with the capacity (and complexity) to deliver
media for hundreds of millions of users, it’s inevitable that things
don’t always go according to plan,” said Steve Santorelli, a former
London police detective and now a researcher at U.S. threat intelligence
firm Team Cymru.
Facebook counted more than 1.35 billion web and 1.12 mobile phone
users on a monthly basis in September, the latest date for which
official figures are available.
Earlier on Tuesday a Twitter account that purports to speak for
hacker group “Lizard Squad” posted messages suggesting that it was
behind an attack that temporarily blocked several major web sites,
including Facebook and Instagram.
The Lizard Squad is a group of unknown hackers that has taken credit
for several high-profile outages, including the attacks that took down
the Sony <6758.T> PlayStation Network and Microsoft’s Xbox Live network last month.
Santorelli said that attacking Internet sites which operate at the
size and scale of Facebook via a classic distributed denial of service
attack would be a huge undertaking, which, while not entirely
impossible, would be “monumentally hard.”
Denial of service attacks direct thousands of infected computers
under an attacker’s control to ping a site or sites, thereby slowing or
blocking access for regular users.
Such attacks can create congestion on branches of the Internet where
the site is located, slowing Web traffic and affecting access to
unrelated services.
As a precaution, Facebook users are advised to change their passwords and review their privacy settings, Santorelli said.
