Facebook, Instagram and Tinder down: Lizard Squad hint at mass website hack
Users lost access to their stored pictures, messages and contact details on the sites for a period of around 40 minutes
Down time: Facebook, Instagram and Tinder users were unable to log in to their accounts this morningHackers are claiming to be responsible for crashing Facebook, Instagram and Tinder this morning.
Millions of the users were without access to their personal data on the dating site and social networks from around 6.30am.
Infamous online hacker group Lizard Squad appeared to claim responsibility for the outage on Twitter.
A message posted from their account hinted other sites were down including MySpace, AOL Instant Messenger and Hipchat.
It said: "Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, AIM, Hipchat #offline #LizardSquad "
The sites, which claim to have more than 1.23bn monthly users, were unable to load for users who were trying to log on.
In a rare outage, visitors to the Facebook website at around 6.30am were greeted with a blank page while those on the app version were unable to update their news feeds.
How to back up your Facebook data, pictures and videos in case of social network meltdown
Instagram was also thought to be down around the same time, a spokesperson confirmed this on Twitter but the tweet was later removed.
It said: "We're aware of an outage affecting Instagram and are working on a fix. Thank you for your patience."
Lizard Squad gained instant notoriety as a hacking collective with a Christmas Day DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attack on both Sony and Microsoft.
Twitter/@Lizardmafia
Hackers: Lizard Squad reveal updates on their Twitter page
A DDoS attack works by generating so much demand for a particular site using botnet computers that it overloads a company’s network and crashes the system.
An alleged member of the Lizard Squad, identified as “Ryan Cleary” spoke to theWashington Post and gave an indication of the group’s motivations.
"[O]ne of our biggest goals is to have fun, of course," the hacker said. "But we're also exposing massive security issues with these companies people are trusting their personal information with. The customers of these companies should be rather worried.”
Yesterday the hackers took over the website of troubled Malaysia Airlines, uploading a picture of a top hat wearing lizard and a rap song.
The frontpage of malaysiaairlines.com was replaced with the image of the reptile, who also sports a black tuxedo, a monocle and a pipe, together with a message which read 404 - Plane Not Found - an apparent reference to missing Flight MH370.
A DDoS attack works by generating so much demand for a particular site using botnet computers that it overloads a company’s network and crashes the system.
An alleged member of the Lizard Squad, identified as “Ryan Cleary” spoke to theWashington Post and gave an indication of the group’s motivations.
"[O]ne of our biggest goals is to have fun, of course," the hacker said. "But we're also exposing massive security issues with these companies people are trusting their personal information with. The customers of these companies should be rather worried.”
Yesterday the hackers took over the website of troubled Malaysia Airlines, uploading a picture of a top hat wearing lizard and a rap song.
The frontpage of malaysiaairlines.com was replaced with the image of the reptile, who also sports a black tuxedo, a monocle and a pipe, together with a message which read 404 - Plane Not Found - an apparent reference to missing Flight MH370.
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