Average Armenian user more dependent on Facebook than users in other countries, cyber security expert says

YEREVAN, January 27. / ARKA /. An average Armenian user is more dependent on Facebook social networking website than users in other countries, a cyber security expert Samvel Martirosyan said in an interview with ARKA news agency.

Facebook, the world's most popular social networking website and Instagram, the photo-sharing website had been down for 40 minutes today- Facebook's longest outage in more than four years. Hacking group Lizard Squad claimed responsibility but on Tuesday Facebook said it was not the victim of hacking.

“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 per cent for everyone," a spokesman said.

When attempting to access Facebook, users were told: "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on it and we'll get it fixed as soon as we can."

"Such outages affect average Armenian users in a specific way because most of them  use Facebook as a platform for reading news feeds,» Samvel Martirosyan said. 

The hacker group CyberCaliphate (also known as the Lizard Squad) is said to be led by a 20-year-old resident of Birmingham Junaid Hussain, who visited Syria several times and may be linked to the Islamic State's militants.

About 60,000 new users in Armenia joined last year the Facebook. The number of active Armenian users of the social networking website  Facebook in December grew to 740,000. -0 –