Facebook and Instagram suffered a worldwide outage for both mobile and desktop sites. Accessing Facebook returned an error that read: "Sorry, something went wrong." The world's largest social network did not reveal the reason behind the service disruption, but after nearly 40 minutes Facebook and Instagram appear to be back online.
Instagram confirmed the outage in a tweet but deleted the post after the service was revived. It's still not clear what caused Facebook and Instagram to go down, which was first reported around 1:10am ET. Neither Facebook nor Instagram reasoned the downtime.
Besides Facebook and Instagram, there were several other social media sites that ceased to function. They include dating site Tinder, AIM, Myspace and Hipchat.
Meanwhile, a hacker group that goes by the name "Lizard Squad" claimed responsibility for the temporary blackout, Reuters reported. The notorious hacker group also took credit for a separate web attack on the Malaysian Airlines website earlier today.
Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, AIM, Hipchat #offline #LizardSquad
— Lizard Squad (@LizardMafia) January 27, 2015
Myspace #offline — Lizard Squad (@LizardMafia) January 27, 2015
According to the Lizard Squad hacker group, there are going to be more cyber attacks.
More to come soon. Side note: We're still organizing the @MAS email dump, stay tuned for that.
— Lizard Squad (@LizardMafia) January 27, 2015
Facebook's outage quickly scaled up to be among Twitter's trending topics. Facebook is yet to confirm the attack on its website along with other services that were disrupted around the same time.
Update: Facebook has released a statement in wake of the latest outage. The social network denied the disruption as the act of hacker group Lizard Squad and blamed it on an internal error.
"Earlier this evening many people had trouble accessing Facebook and Instagram," a company 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."
