Hacker group Lizard Squad claims responsibility for Facebook, Instagram outage

The notorious hacker group Lizard Squad has apparently claimed responsibility for shutting down Facebook and Instagram on Tuesday,  an outage that left potentially millions of users worldwide out in the cold—and potentially vulnerable to privacy breaches.

 

On its Twitter account, Lizard Squad claimed as "#offline" Facebook, Instagram, and a handful of other social media services:

 

Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, AIM, Hipchat #offline #LizardSquad

— Lizard Squad (@LizardMafia) January 27, 2015

 

More ominously, however, the group also posted a tweet "for all the mad people" referencing "doxxing"—Internet slang for posting personal information online:

 

For all the mad people: pic.twitter.com/t2O1woZeAp

— Lizard Squad (@LizardMafia) January 27, 2015

 

Facebook and its photo sharing subsidiary, Instagram, were inaccessible worldwide Tuesday afternoon, leaving many to wonder about the cause of the outage.

 

Lizard Squad rose to prominence late last year after a series of high-profile hacks on Sony and Microsoft.

 

The group also claimed responsibility for hacking Malaysia Airlines' website on Monday, threatening to release private information supposedly gleaned from the site:

 

More to come soon. Side note: We're still organizing the @MAS email dump, stay tuned for that.

— Lizard Squad (@LizardMafia) January 27, 2015

 

— GMA News