Hackers claim Facebook and Instagram attack

Websites like Facebook (NasdaqGS: FB – News), Tinder and Instagram are temporarily down – leaving millions of users worldwide unable to log in.

Facebook users in the UK, US, Asia and Australia complained about being banned from the world's largest social network.

Instagram – owned by Facebook – informed users via its Twitter account (Xetra: A1W6XZ – News) that it was aware of an outage and was working on a solution.

AIM (SES: E1:A54.SI – News) and Hipchat are also said to be affected.

The hacking group Lizard Squad, which recently claimed responsibility for a Christmas attack on PlayStation and Xbox Live services, said on Twitter that it was responsible for the problems.

A member of the group, who had previously spoken to Sky News about the Christmas hack, posted a message “for all the crazy people”.

In the Twitter photo, he is holding up a piece of paper that says “DOX ME” – an apparent reference to “doxxing,” a slang term for publishing personal information online.

Facebook and Instagram, which were down for about an hour before normal service resumed, denied that their services had been hacked and blamed the outage on “a change that affected our configuration systems.”

The incident came a day after the group announced it had hacked Malaysia Airlines' website and posted the message: “404 – Plane not found. Hacked by the Cyber ​​Caliphate.”

The group warned on Twitter that it was preparing to release emails related to the troubled airline online.

Facebook had 1.25 billion monthly active users at the end of September.