Facebook: we weren’t taken down by hackers
Facebook denies Lizard Squad is responsible for an hour-long outage
Facebook has denied that an infamous hacking group was responsible for an hour-long outage that hit the social network this morning. Lizard Squad posted a message on its Twitter account boasting that it had knocked five services offline, including Facebook and the Facebook-owned Instagram.
The Facebook outage occurred whilst most Britons were tucked up in bed, starting just after 6am today and lasting for around an hour. Facebook was seemingly unavailable in many countries, including the UK and the US, with the site simply returning error messages.
Lizard Squad posted a message on its Twitter feed, claiming the credit for bringing down the Facebook sites, as well as casual dating service Tinder, and the AIM and HipChat messaging services. HipChat still appeared to be having problems at the time of writing (8:30am GMT).
Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, AIM, Hipchat #offline #LizardSquad
— Lizard Squad (@LizardMafia) January 27, 2015
However, Facebook denies the hackers had anything to do with its problems. “Earlier this evening many people had trouble accessing Facebook and Instagram,” a spokeswoman told the BBC. “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% for everyone.”
Yesterday, Lizard Squad defaced the website of Malaysian Airlines and claimed it had accessed the personal data of the airline’s passengers, a claim that was rejected by the company.
It’s also threatened to launch renewed attacks on online gaming networks. The group has in the past claimed responsibility for outages on both the PSN and Xbox Live networks.