Right now Facebook, Instagram and Hipchat are offline. Twitter is erupting with complaints about the popular social networks being offline. The infrastructure used by the large scale services is considerable and if the outage is a result of an attack, it would take a serious, sustained effort. These services will come back and will explain the outage, but until they do, we don’t have much to go on. The pesky hacking group known as LizardSquad posted this:
https://twitter.com/LizardMafia/status/559963134006292481
It’s possible they are involved, given they were able to take Xbox Live and PSN offline over the Christmas break. It’s also equally possible they have nothing to do with the outage. There has to be a commonality between these services, either the same vulnerability, or the same back-end like a CDN, and that could be the source of the attack.
The outage is a serious one, taking out Facebook subsites like Facebook Developers. Instagram’s blog is still online, clearly running from different servers as the main site remains down – http://blog.instagram.com/
It’s also possible this is an international attack on US-based companies. It is believed that a recent 8 hour internet outage in North Korea was a US-lead response to The Interview. There’s also been other sites like Tinder, MySpace and AIM that have been unavailable temporarily but now appear to be back online.
Let us know in the comments what you think and if there’s any other sites offline.
Update
BREAKING: Facebook's Instagram service says it is aware of outage and is working on a fix.
— The Associated Press (@AP) January 27, 2015
Update 2
Facebook is back online, although performance seems slow. It’s possible this was a DDOS attack and Facebook were able to increase bandwidth to bring the site back online. The debrief from this one should be interesting.
#Facebook is again loading for me here in Bangkok. Now don’t everyone try it at once!
— Steve Herman (@W7VOA) January 27, 2015
While the Facebook-owned Instagram unsurprisingly came back online at the same time as Facebook, Australian-born Atlassian’ s enterprise chat service HipChat also came back online at the same time.
The outage lasted around 40 minutes and affected users worldwide.
Update 3
Ok LizardSquad are absolutely claiming responsibility for the outage and say there’s more to come soon.
https://twitter.com/LizardMafia/status/559969713204514816
The same member of LizardSquad that appeared on a BBC interview over the Christmas attacks has boldly posted a image of himself holding a sign. The sign says ‘Dox Me’ which shows an unbelievable confidence that he won’t be found, despite some very motivated authorities. Doxing is the practice of exposing a user’s personal details, like phone number or address.
https://twitter.com/LizardMafia/status/559967323189420032
