Facebook, Instagram and Tinder temporarily offline in apparent hack
Facebook, Instagram and Tinder have all been temporarily disrupted with hacking group LizardSquad hinting at being the cause behind the short-term service outage.
No details have been revealed by Facebook at the time of writing about what caused the social media platforms offline, although the three all have connections to Facebook servers. Whatsapp, which is owned by Facebook, remained unaffected by events however.
Hacking collective Lizard Squad intimated that it may have had something to do with the downtime in the form of a cryptic tweet drawing attention to the outage but the precise cause remains unclear.
Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, AIM, Hipchat #offline #LizardSquad
— Lizard Squad (@LizardMafia) January 27, 2015
In a statement Facebook denied any third party involvement however, laying the blame squarely on the shoulders of its own engineers: “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."
One more side effect: Tinder is down cause it's linked to Facebook. Although I don't use it. pic.twitter.com/ThwB38sgqN
— Kris Cheng (@krislc) January 27, 2015
Lizard Squad certainly have form in the field of bringing big websites offline by mounting so-called denial of service attacks by bombarding their servers with spam traffic to the point that their infrastructure cannot cope. Although an attack on this scale would be highly unusual.
Only yesterday the group claimed responsibility for disrupting the website of Malaysian Airlines, along with a threat of further attacks.