14 DAY TRIAL // Social network Facebook went down this morning for no clear reason as part of what some people call a massive cyber attack against several other online services.
While there is no evidence that this outage is caused by hacker attacks, the Facebook page doesn't seem to load at all and users aren't provided with any error to detail the problem. On the other hand, some claim that at random times Facebook shows an error reading “Sorry, something went wrong. We''re working on it and we'll get it fixed as soon as we can.”
In addition to Facebook, several other online services also appear to be down at the time of writing this article, including Instagram, Tinder, AIM, and Hipchat. There's still no confirmation that the outage experienced by all these services are connected to each other or not.
WhatsApp, the mobile messaging service that Facebook acquired last year, is up and running right now all over the world, with no reported downtimes during the social network's connectivity issues.
At this point, Facebook and Instagram are unavailable both on the web and via smartphone apps, no matter the platform, so those who need to access their accounts right now have no other option than to wait and hope that the companies behind these two services would fix them as soon as possible.
Update 1: Instagram has just confirmed the issues and promised to deliver a fix as soon as possible.
We're aware of an outage affecting Instagram and are working on a fix. Thank you for your patience.
— Instagram (@instagram) January 27, 2015
Update 2: Access to Facebook has been restored in most of the countries, but there's still no info on what has caused the problems.
Update 3: Facebook says that the outage wasn't caused by a hack attack, but due to some changes it made to its servers.
In a statement for the BBC, a Facebook spokesperson said that "this was not the result of a third-party attack but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems. We moved quickly to fix the problem, and both services are back to 100% for everyone."