Facebook hit by crash

AUSTRALIA was among countries affected by a massive Facebook outage lasting roughly 40 minutes yesterday.

Users poke fun at the latest Facebook outage. Source Teespring.com

AUSTRALIA was among countries affected by a massive Facebook outage yesterday.

Instagram, dating site Tinder and messaging service HipChat also were reportedly offline. The outage is believed to have hit users in the US, Britain and Asia.

According to reports on Twitter, the Facebook outage began in Australia about 5.15pm AEST and ended sometime after 6pm.

At the time of the attack, Instagram said it was aware of an outage and was working on a fix.

“We’re aware of an outage affecting Instagram and are working on a fix. Thank you for your patience,” it said.

But it deleted the post once the issue was resolved.

Last night Facebook confirmed the outage and took responsibility for it. It denied it had been the victim of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.

The disruption “was not the result of a third party attack but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems,” a Facebook spokeswoman told The Wall Street Journal.

“We moved quickly to fix the problem, and both services are back to 100 per cent for everyone.”

Facebook has about 1.25 billion users and Instagram has 300 million.

As Facebook access returned in Asia, some users reported that the site was loading or responding slowly.

Before Facebook’s statement, the hacking group Lizard Squad has claimed responsibility for the shutdown.

“Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, AIM, Hipchat #offline #LizardSquad,” it tweeted.

Lizard Squad recently claimed responsibility for hacking the Malaysia Airlines website, in which it displayed a picture of a lizard wearing a top hat over the error message “404 — Plane Not Found”.

During and after the outage the Twitter hashtag #facebookdown was trending and some were making light of the outage on the rival social network.

“Reports that the long term downward trend in Australia’s productivity halted about 30 minutes ago,” one user tweeted.

“We’re holding thumbs for Zuckerberg’s big announcement: Will Facebook be paper-based from now on?,” quipped another.

“Looks like I’ll have to socialise for once with the family. They seem like nice people,” said a third.

Instagram users also copped it: “I’m outside & I can’t figure what filter this is, but it’s not awesome. Trees look awful,” said another.

It’s unlikely Facebook would stay offline for too long given it has a massive global data centre network and mirrors user content in different data repositories across the world.

Additional reporting: AAP