Facebook and Instagram were down worldwide for around an hour today after an alleged cyber attack. The
online group Lizard Squad have claimed responsibility for the hack,
which took the two social media sites down at around 6am GMT.
Both sites, which have a total of
1.5billion users, appeared with error messages in the United States,
Europe and Asia for around an hour. But
despite hackers claiming they took the social media giants offline,
Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, which also owns Instagram, refused to say
what the fault was.
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.’
There were claims online that the super-snowstorm that is over America’s east coast may have knocked out its servers.
The social media blackout also affected the dating mobile app Tinder, as well as AOL Instant Messenger and Hipchat.
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.’
There is no word at this time what is
causing the outage, and whether or not it might have anything to do with
the ongoing blizzard, which is expected to dump 36 inches of snow in
parts of New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey and
Connecticut, where key servers are based.
Less than 30 minutes into the shutdown, a hacker group known as the Lizard Squad claimed responsibility for the outage.
The outage sparked panic online, but the majority retained a sense of humour
Another user Gino Quillamor wrote: ‘Now
that facebook is down, I might actually have to ask people how they’re
feeling in real life. “What’s on your mind?”‘
Rob Lee joked: ‘If Facebook &
Instagram are down how am I supposed to know what my aunt had for dinner
or if any of my friends held a Starbucks cup today???’
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