Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) said it suffered a self-inflicted outage lasting an hour on Tuesday that made its site inaccessible to users worldwide.
The glitch reported in Canada, the United States, Asia, Australia and the U.K. affected access from PCs and Facebook's mobile app. The social media giant's Instagram service was also inaccessible.
A Facebook statement said the disruption was caused by a technical change it made to the site and wasn't a cyberattack. Lizard Squad, a group notorious for attention seeking antics online, claimed responsibility on Twitter for the outages.
The temporary loss of service may be Facebook's biggest outage since Sept. 24, 2010 when it was down for about 2.5 hours.
On its website for developers, Facebook said the "major outage" lasted one hour.
Facebook has about 1.35 billion active users and Instagram has some 300 million.
News of the Facebook outage set rival social network Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) alight, propelling the hashtag "facebookdown" to top trend on the site. Twitter comes ahead of Facebook reporting its quarterly earnings on Wednesday.
Facebook shares opened Tuesday down 83.5 cents, or 1.1%, at $76.66 U.S., within a 52-week trading range of $51.85 U.S. to $82.17 U.S., while Twitter shares opened Tuesday's session down 61 cents, or 1.5%, at $39.49 U.S., within a 52-week range of $29.51 U.S. to $67.24 U.S.
