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Facebook: Internal Error to Blame for Outages


FILE - A man is silhouetted against a video screen with an Facebook logo.
FILE - A man is silhouetted against a video screen with an Facebook logo.

Facebook, the world's largest social network, and its Instagram photo-sharing site, suffered temporary outages around the world for up to an hour on Tuesday and the company said later that an internal software networking error was to blame.

The outage at Facebook 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.

“This was not the result of a third-party attack but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems,” the Facebook statement 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 from around 0600 GMT. Services were restored within an hour of going down, users reported.

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.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story asserted that the Lizard Squad hacker group attempted to take credit for the attack. In fact, the group noted the attack but did not claim it was their work. VOA regrets the error.

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    Reuters

    Reuters is a news agency founded in 1851 and owned by the Thomson Reuters Corporation based in Toronto, Canada. One of the world's largest wire services, it provides financial news as well as international coverage in over 16 languages to more than 1000 newspapers and 750 broadcasters around the globe.

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