Hackers Claimed Responsibility for Facebook Downtime

At about 12:10 a.m. this morning, Facebook and Instagram went down, leaving millions of users around the world unable to update their status or post pictures

Visitors to Facebook were greeted with a blank page this morning, while those on the app could not refresh their newsfeeds. Instagram (which is owned by Facebook) and Tinder (which relies on Facebook user data) were also inaccessible.

The outage affected a large portion of the United States, according to downdetector.com. Users across Asia, Australia and New Zealand also reported having trouble logging on. People quickly took to Twitter and the outage quickly spawned a hashtag, #facebookdown.

Lizard Squad, a group notorious for attention-seeking antics online, who claimed it had defaced the Malaysia Airlines website and would release data from the airline, also claimed responsibility on Twitter for the Facebook outages. Its previous hacking claims have been mostly aimed at gaming or media companies.

Facebook was quick to deny any hack, saying that said the disruption was caused by a technical change and wasn't a cyber-attack. "This was not the result of a third party attack but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems," its statement said.

The temporary loss of service may be Facebook's biggest outage since Sept. 24, 2010, when it was down for about 2.5 hours.