Social Media giants Facebook, Instagram and Tinder were hit by simultaneous outages on Tuesday, which led many to suspect a coordinated cyberattack, reports City AM.
All three social media services are now back up and running after outages early on Tuesday, starting around 12:10 AM, EST. Initially, it appeared to be another hit from the Lizard Squad hacking collective, who appeared to take credit with a tweet reading "Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, AIM, Hipchat #offline #LizardSquad"
However, Facebook - which also owns Instagram - was quick to deny any kind of hacking had taken a place, telling Mashable, "Earlier this evening 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."
If this is correct, the Tinder issues would appear to be related to Facebook's outage, as the dating app uses Facebook login data to manage user accounts.
Despite this denial, the Lizard Squad tweet certainly attracted a lot of attention, and is at the time of writing, still pinned to the top of the hacking collective's Twitter account, retweeted 5,400 times. The group has been in the headlines a lot over the last month, first for the Christmas downtime of PSN and Xbox Live, then for its DDoS attack as-a-service website, and just yesterday for hacking the Malaysia Airlines website.
However Facebook remains adamant that the downtime is dealt with, with the social media giant's Andrew Pope telling The Register that, "we don't expect any other break in service."
