Lizard Squad 'cyber terrorists' not responsible for Facebook, Instagram and Tinder outages

Facebook, Instagram, and Tinder users were not able to log in to their account in an unprecedented multiple social network outage.

17:50 27 January 2015

Millions of users temporarily loss access to their Facebook, Instagram, and Tinder accounts at the same time prompting speculation of a cyber attack.

Infamous online hacker group Lizard Squad appeared to claim responsibility for the outage on Twitter. However, Facebook has denied the claims while Twitter staff said that the downtime was due to technical issue caused by a change in configuration systems.

A Facebook spokesperson said: "Earlier today many people had trouble accessing Facebook and Instagram.

"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.”

Meanwhile, a message posted from the Lizard Squad account hinted that they were responsible for the downtime. It reads: “Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, AIM, Hipchat #offline #LizardSquad.

Lizard Squad gained instant notoriety after attacking both Sony and Microsoft recently.

An alleged member of the Lizard Squad, identified as “Ryan Cleary” provided an insight as to why the group hacks the websites. He said: "[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.”