Users of Facebook and Instagram in Africa and the rest of the world experienced difficulties while trying to connect to the social media sites earlier on Tuesday. Facebook was down for about 40 minutes and it seemed like the end of the world for many addicts of the popular social networking site. Its 1.23 billion active users were however left in limbo when their updates, ready to be posted, and the next ‘cool’ selfie, set to be shared, all failed to materialize. Having experienced such frustration, several social media junkies thronged to twitter to air their grievances using #FacebookDown.
During the outages, Facebook users saw a message that read: “Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.” But there was no official statement from the online social networking service about the outages, which left millions of users wondering what went wrong.
Photo-sharing site, Instagram, owned by Facebook, however, said it was aware of an outage.
“We’re aware of an outage affecting Instagram and are working on a fix. Thank you for your patience,” the tweet, which was later deleted said.
Hacker group Lizard Squad appeared to be claiming responsibility for the outages in a tweet where it listed social sites that were down. “Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, AIM, Hipchat #offline #LizardSquad,” it tweeted. The group has been associated with some high-profile cyber attacks in recent times, including hacks on the gaming network of Microsoft and Sony. Music-focused social networking site, MySpace, seemed to have also been targeted by the group, but there was no focus on twitter, a platform the group has been active on.
If only we didn’t use twitter to communicate…
— Lizard Squad (@LizardMafia) January 27, 2015
A spokesman for Facebook moved to dismiss the site was hacked, saying the outage was not the result of a third-party interference, “but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems.”
“Both services are back to 100 per cent for everyone,” the spokesperson added.
