Facebook suffers self-inflicted outage affecting users across the world

NEW DELHI: Facebook went down world over for about an hour on Tuesday, prompting many users to send out tweets screaming the “#SocialOutage2015”.

Facebook, which has close to 1.35 billion monthly active users globally, sent automated messages to its users on both computers and mobile app that their accounts were temporarily unavailable.

Photo-sharing app Instagram, also owned by Facebook Inc, too, showed that there was no internet connection. Some hackers claimed credit for the outage, but Facebook denied it. A Twitter user by the name @LizardMafia said, “Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, AIM, Hipchat #offline. More to come soon.”

But Facebook developers immediately rubbished this. “Facebook and Instagram experienced a major outage tonight (Monday) from 22:10 until 23:10 Pacific Standard Time (11:40 am to 12:40 pm on Tuesday in India).

Our engineers identified the cause of the outage and recovered the site quickly. You should now see decreasing error rates while our systems stabilise. We don’t expect any other break in service,” it said.

Soon, it was followed by a post on the resolution of the issue in all geographic regions. Facebook later said the outage was not caused by hackers, but it was the result of an internal error.