Facebook outage: Has Lizard Squad struck again? Cryptic tweet fuels speculation

Facebook and Instagram went down today morning from 11.40am onwards  and stayed so for close to an hour for most users. While Facebook and Instagram are still figuring out what caused the outage, hacker group Lizard Squad has sent out a tweet which hints that they might be the party responsible for causing the outage.

A lot of websites have taken this as an admission by Lizard Squad that they were behind the denial-of-service attack, which was noticed by the site iPViking. According to iPViking, there was a large amount of online denial of service attack traffic which was directed towards IP addresses in the US, possibly the Facebook and Instagram servers there. The site shows a live infograph of what seems like attacks from countries such as China, Brazil, the United States itself, Russia and more. The fact that Lizard Squad is behind the attack gains more momentum with this particular tweet from the @LizardMafia account which is the official Lizard Squad account.  Does it mean that Lizard Squad would have taken down Twitter as well, if that wasn’t its means of communications? No one knows for sure. 

Just yesterday, there were reports  that Lizard Squad members had attacked the Malaysian Airlines website. It then tweeted out a message saying that they were in the process of organising an email dump and that there would be more leaks.

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Lizard Squad came into prominence last year with attacks on the **Xbox One and Sony PlayStation Network servers** .  While Xbox Live was back after a day, Sony’s PlayStation Networks experienced an outage for nearly three days. Earlier in August 2014, the group was were involved with **hacking Sony Online Entertainment's Twitter account** .  They made the plane carrying Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley to be diverted after posting through their Twitter account that the American Airlines flight had explosives on board. In an interview to The Washington Post, an alleged Lizard Squad member, when asked why Lizard Squad was carrying out these hack attacks, said, “Well, one of our biggest goals is to have fun, of course. But we’re also exposing massive security issues with these companies people are trusting their personal information with. The customers of these companies should be rather worried.” According to Lizard Squad, it was sending data at the rate of 1.2 terabits per second when carrying out the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on Sony PlayStation Network.  Lizard Squad is also known to be selling its own **DDoS attack tool** called the Lizard Stresser. It is offering eight packages that range from $6 per month for taking down a site for 100 seconds to $130/month for taking down a site for over eight hours. It is also offering lifetime options ranging from $30 to $500. A DDoS attack is a method to overload a server with requests and eventually make its network or machine unavailable for its users.