by Muyiwa Matuluko

Around 7am on Tuesday, while many were asleep, Facebook and Instagram were down. But it wasn’t for long. Barely an hour later, the servers were back up. Which explains why some of you may not have noticed.

At the time, it wasn’t particularly clear what the cause of the outage was. A Twitter account claiming to represent the “Lizard Squad” group came forward to claim responsibility for the attack. Facebook has however released an official statement in denial of the claims.

Earlier this morning [Tuesday] many people had trouble accessing Facebook and Instagram. This was not the result of a third party attack but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems.

The temporary loss of service may be Facebook’s biggest outage since 2010 when it was down for about 2.5 hours. Facebook has over 1.35 billion active users while Instagram has over 300 million.

Muyiwa