Facebook says 'issue' not a hack

SAN JOSE, Calif. (KTVU) - It’s unclear what caused Facebook to be down for hours on Wednesday. Users around the world reported issues with logging and posting on the site as well as Instagram and What’s App. 

At San Jose State, many students eat, live and breathe social media so when they couldn't log onto Facebook and Instgram. 

“I woke up this morning, couldn't log onto my account,” said Ivy Moore of San Jose. “I thought someone hacked my account.”

“When it wasn't working, I was like really upset and didn't know what to do with my life,” said Kathy Nguyen of San Jose. 

Many students spent the day hitting the refresh button. Users around the world experienced a variety of problems.

“I had a lot of notifications,” said Meliza Jimenez of San Jose. “I was going to go check on them, but they weren't loading.”

An error message popped up when one user tried to post comments on Facebook. 

“It says something went wrong we are getting this fixed as soon as we can,” said Tuan Bui of San Jose. 

According to Down Detector.Com that tracks outages on social media, people started reporting problems as early as 9 a.m. 

Facebook took to its competitor Twitter and said the company is aware people are having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. Facebook then tweeted the issue is not related to a “DDoS attack” in other words, a hack. 

“They have a very strong engineering team at Facebook and they couldn't resolve it in a span of seven, eight hours so far,” said SJSU Cybersecurity Expert Ahmed Banafa. “At the same time this is money, they lose money and its reputation of reliability.”

Banafa said the outage is significant because of how long it lasted. He suspects it's a connectivity issue.

“The interesting thing about this problem is that it's global,” said Banafa. “It's not just United States, it's South America, it's Asia, it is Europe,” said Banafa. “That gives me an indication it's the global network that connects all those sites together is suffering from something.”

For real estate agent Nicholas Lampkin, the outage affected his bottom line.

“We have a pretty decent presence on social media so if we aren't able to post what we need to post, it's obviously not beneficial for us,” said Lampkin. 

So far, the outage hasn't impacted Facebook shares. Tech experts said, it's because the outage appears to be a technical issue not a hack.