The reason why Facebook/IG/Tinder was recently down

Yesterday, January 27, users of Facebook as well as other social media sites worldwide reported that they had problems accessing the website because “something went wrong”. Most people thought it was another hack attack from a group of cyber terrorists, but Facebook explains the real reason behind it.

In addition to Facebook, Instagram, match-maker app Tinder, AIM, and Hipchat were also offline around 2:30PM PHT yesterday.

Lizard Squad, a group of cyber terrorists, claimed that they werethe reason these sites were offline. Speculations arose that a certain type of cyber attack, DDoS (distributed denial-of-service), was used — forcing the website to crash due to huge amounts of traffic specifically concentrated on them until the sites could no longer accommodate it.

Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, AIM, Hipchat #offline #LizardSquad

— Lizard Squad (@LizardMafia) January 27, 2015

Although this may be the case, a Facebook spokesperson stepped forward and told The Verge that it was “not the result of a third party attack but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems.” After which the spokesperson added that their engineers “moved quickly to fix the problem, and services are back to 100% for everyone.”

True enough, the outage of the sites and mobile apps only lasted for about an hour until everything was up and running again.

Updated: only Instagram is currently owned by Facebook.

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