Overnight, reports circulated about Facebook and Instagram going dark. Now, Lizard Squad is claiming to have taken down a large handful of sites — albeit briefly.
Reports suggest that Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, MySapce, AIM and Hipchat at the very least were affected by the alleged attack. All those sites are definitely now back up and running properly, and reports about how long there were down varies — certainly less than an hour for Facebook though.
It’s a short, sharp impact but on wide selection of sites. Indeed, if its is the work of Lizard Squad, the ability to take out such a wide range of sites in one go is worrying. We currently have no more details, but will update if we find out more.
Update: A Facebook spokesperson has told The Verge that this was “not the result of a third party attack but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems.” It’s suspected that the Tinder outage may have been triggered by the Facebook outage.