Group claims Facebook hack

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Published Jan 27, 2015

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Frankfurt - Facebook, the world's largest social network, and Instagram suffered temporary outages on Tuesday and a hacker group associated with other recent high-profile attacks claimed it caused the outages.

Both sites, which have a total of 1.5billion users, appeared with error messages in the US, Europe and Asia.

A Twitter account that purports to speak for hacker group "Lizard Squad" posted messages suggesting that it was behind an attack the temporarily blocked several major websites.

Facebook, its photo-sharing site Instagram, and other popular social networking sites, were unavailable from around 0600 GMT for upward of an hour according to user reports and web monitoring sites in countries across the Americas, Asia and Europe.

The social media blackout also affected the dating mobile app Tinder, as well as AOL Instant Messenger and Hipchat, the Daily Mail said.

Facebook, which also owns Instagram, refused to say what the fault was.

There were claims online that the huge storm that is over America's east coast may have got its servers.

While it was down Facebook said they were 'aware' of trouble accessing the site and added: 'We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.'

An Instagram spokesman posted on Twitter: 'We're aware of an outage affecting Instagram and are working on a fix. Thank you for your patience.'

The hashtag #facebookdown immediately started tending on Twitter.

The Daily Mail says the Lizard Squad is a group of hackers that has caused havoc in the online world before, taking credit for attacks that took down the Sony PlayStation Network and Microsoft's Xbox Live network last month.

This morning the group tweeted 'Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, AIM, Hipchat #offline #LizardSquad'.

Reuters, Daily Mail

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