Could 'Lizard Squad' be responsible for the Facebook and Instagram outage?

Internet sites including Facebook, the world’s largest social network, Instagram and other popular sites suffered temporary outages on Tuesday and a hacker group associated with other recent high-profile attacks claimed it caused the outages.

A Twitter account that purports to speak for hacker group “Lizard Squad” posted messages suggesting that it was behind an attack the temporarily blocked several major web sites. Facebook, its photo-sharing site Instagram, and other popular social networking sites, were unavailable from around 0600 GMT for upward of an hour according to user reports and Web monitoring sites in countries across the Americas, Asia and Europe. **Earlier** today, Facebook and Instagram were not accessible on the web as well as mobile platforms. Facebook hasn’t released any communication as to what has caused the outage which occured around 1.10am ET or around 11.40am IST. A lot of users also reported about Tinder, AOL Instant Messenger and Hipchat also being down. According to  iPViking, we are seeing large amounts of online denial of service attack traffic which is directed towards IP addresses in the US, possibly the Facebook and Instagram servers in the US. The site shows a live infograph of what seems like attacks from countries such as China, Brazil, United States itself, Russia and more. With inputs from Reuters