Social media companies scrambled on Wednesday to scrub footage of a shooting outside a German synagogue from their platforms, in the first major test of their systems since a massacre in the New Zealand city of Christchurch prompted a global outcry.

The attacker in Germany, who livestreamed his rampage on Amazon's gaming subsidiary Twitch, shot dead two people after failing to gain entry to the synagogue on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year.

The nearly 36-minute-long video closely resembled footage livestreamed in March in Christchurch, where the gunman also wore a camera to capture a first-person perspective as he killed 51 people at two mosques.