Tuesday, January 27, 2015
Netizens turn to Twitter as Facebook, Instagram bog down
MANILA, Philippines—Social media behemoths Facebook and Instagram crashed at about 2:30 p.m. Tuesday afternoon (Philippine time).
The meltdown rocked the online world, prompting users to turn to their Twitter accounts and report the incident.
The hashtag “#Facebookdown” surged to become the top trending topic worldwide while the words “Facebook and Instagram” were also in the top 10 worldwide trending topics.
Instagram has acknowledged the outage in a post on its official Twitter account: “We’re aware of an outage affecting Instagram and are working on a fix. Thank you for your patience.”
A massive Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack in the United States caused the servers of Facebook, Instagram and AIM to go down on Tuesday, according to digitalattackmap.com.
US was targeted by a massive amount of data requests, causing the servers of social networking sites to crash due to the load.
Twitter account @Reddit_tech_new tweeted about the DDoS attack after several minutes of the site being down.
Facebook and Instagram were restored at 3:10 p.m. (Philippine time).
Aside from Facebook and Instagram, users noted that dating app Tinder, AIM and HipChat were also down.