If you are always browsing through Facebook in efforts to find the latest gossip, or sharing your ill-posed photos on Instagram to generate comments and let people know you were looking a certain kind of way, then you must have noticed that the two were down for almost one hour yesterday morning.
During the time the two were down, anyone who tried logging into Facebook was faced with a message saying something went wrong and a possible fix was being worked on. Instagram on the other hand could not load any new updates for the period.
Through a blog post, Facebook communicated that they were aware of the problem and would be fixing it in no time, while Instagram took to Twitter to inform its customers that the problem was being fixed and they should be patient.
In almost what seemed like an hour, the two social platforms were back alongside others that use Facebook to allow users to log in for their services.
While Facebook insisted that the problem had been as a result of a new change introduced that affected the sites configuration settings, there was rumour that the problem had been brought about by a cyber attack incidence.
Rumours that were channeled through a Twitter account alleged to be that of a hacking group calling itself Lizard Squad. The said group has claimed responsibility for various site failures, with the recent one being responsibility for defacing an Airline website, a situation that the airline denied was true.
The tweet, posted through an account claimed to be associated with the Lizard hackers group hinted on its responsibility as it read: “Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, AIM, Hipchat #offline #LizardSquad” The tweet account using @LizardMafia as its Twitter handle.
Following the claims, speculations loomed that the sites indeed been hacked through a common form of cyberattack going by DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) that is channeled to slow down user experience.
Facebook however, denied that the failure that must have caused the network millions in losses had been as a result of a third party infiltration, saying the problem was solely internal and had been fixed.
Lizard Squad has claimed responsibility for various DDoS attacks in the recent times, including the Xbox Live hack in early December, North Korea’s internet disruption to the end of December and even the series of attack for the PlayStation Network in August and December.
