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No, Lizard Squad Was Not Responsible For Facebook Outage

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Contrary to suggestions hacker group Lizard Squad took out Facebook, there was almost certainly no attack on the social network and its photo sharing property Instagram, which both went down late last night. According to a source with knowledge of the matter, the downtime was the result of a technical foul up. Facebook is now confirming this in statements to media.

Some had suspected that Lizard Squad, which was responsible for the Christmas strikes on Microsoft’s Xbox Live and Sony’s PlayStation Network, had hit Facebook with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, where a web service is swamped with traffic. But the source said internal issues were to blame and there was no DDoS.

There’s another big clue that hints there was no DDoS: this was a simultaneous global outage. Facebook is a huge organisation, with highly distributed systems. An attacker would have to figure out how to disable all of them at once, which would take high technical ability and knowledge of Facebook’s worldwide networks. Though Lizard Squad has proven itself adept at knocking out big services, it has not shown itself capable of knocking out something as huge as Facebook.

Facebook and Instagram are now back online. They only appeared to be down for around 40 minutes or so. "Facebook and Instagram experienced a major outage tonight from 22:10 until 23:10 PST. Our engineers identified the cause of the outage and recovered the site quickly. You should now see decreasing error rates while our systems stabilize. We don't expect any other break in service," said Andrew Pope, production engineering manager at Facebook.

A spokesperson for Lizard Squad was not available for comment. The collective has had some security problems of its own of late, as a database for its DDoS service, Lizard Stresser, was leaked to press. Though reports indicated the Lizards had been hacked, a spokesperson told Forbes the crew passed around the unencrypted database to use passwords for future attacks and a trusted source had leaked it.