Facebook Inc. (FB) Rubbishes “Lizard Squad” Hacking Claim For Network Outage

Giant social networking platform Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) has rubbished suggestion that an outage experienced early Tuesday morning was the work of a third party as earlier alleged. The outage affected other services offered by Facebook including photo sharing platform Instagram and dating service Tinder.

Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) in a statement maintains that the outage was down to an internal software networking error and that there was no data loss as a result of the entire ordeal. The company was reportedly initiating some changes on its configuration systems where something went wrong causing the outage. The downturn comes just a day before Facebook posts its quarterly earnings.

The outage affected user’s access on PC’s as well as Facebook mobile app and lasted nearly an hour after which everything returned to normalcy.  Users who tried to login into their Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) accounts during the ordeal were greeted by the message ‘Account Temporarily Unavailable.’ The mobile app was also affected with users blocked from loading any new posts.

Users on Instagram, on the other hand, could not load their accounts home page or bring up any recently loaded images.  The latest outage is the biggest since Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) went offline in 2010 for two and half hours. When Facebook returned online users in Asia were still complaining that it was taking too long to load their homepages.

Earlier, there had been reports that the Lizard Squad hacking group was behind the attack having successfully gained access to the Malaysia Airlines website over the weekend. This was after a Twitter account purporting to speak for the group claimed responsibility for the outage.

The hacking group has already carried out a string of high-profile outages with notable ones being attacks that took down Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)’s Xbox Live network last month, as well as Sony Corp (ADR) (NYSE:SNE)’s Play Station Network.

The outage on the other hand meant that Facebook was the top trending topic on Twitter Inc. (NYSE:TWTR) with the hashtag ‘Facebookdown.’

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