Facebook denies social network hack

On 27 January 2015 social networking platforms Facebook, Instagram and Tinder suffered an hour long outage. The outage resulted in Facebook and Instagram users within Africa, as well as the rest of the world, being unable to connect to these services.
While no official statement was released, at the time of the outage, infamous hacking group “LizardSquad” stated they were behind the attack. This was according to an article published by BBC.co.uk. However, Facebook has since denied the rumour.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook denied being the victim of a hacking attack and said its site and photo-sharing app Instagram had suffered an outage after it introduced a configuration change.
“The disruption was not the result of a third party attack, but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems,” a Facebook spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal. “We moved quickly to fix the problem, and both services are back to 100% for everyone.”
According to the Mail Online, the social media blackout also affected the dating mobile app Tinder, as well as AOL Instant Messenger and Hipchat.
The hacking group LizardSquad has claimed responsibility for many service interruptions in the past, including: hacking the Sony PlayStation Network and Microsoft’s Xbox Live network in December 2014. Additionally, LizardSquad came under spotlight after the hackers claimed responsibility for the attack of website of Malaysia Airlines.

Source: httpwww.itnewsafrica.com