Lizard Squad claim responsibility for Instagram, Facebook DDoS attack

Black hat hacking organization Lizard Squad has claimed responsibility for attacks on Instagram and Facebook Messenger on November 18, which saw the services go down for millions of users across the world.

Popular social media sites Instagram and Facebook Messenger went down for about an hour on November 18, leaving users unable to message and scroll through the sites. 

It was speculated to be an attack on Facebook servers originally, but now a hacking group has stepped forward to take responsibility for the outages that affected users primarily in North America and Europe.

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Lizard Squad noted on their Twitter page on November 18 that they were the group behind Facebook’s platform-wide outage. 

• Read more: Lizard Squad members reportedly arrested

“Try sending a message through Instagram, Facebook Messenger,” the group stated. 

The outage, which was suspected to be a distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, overloaded Facebook’s servers, leaving users unable to access the website’s themselves. Messages were not sending or being sent over Messenger and Instagram, while posts were not posting and loading on Facebook.

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Lizard Squad are a veteran hacking organization who have been flung back into the spotlight after a spate of recent attacks. Fortnite, Modern Warfare, and the UK Labour Party have all fallen into the notorious group’s targets.

• Read more: Fortnite servers go down on November 9

However, their attacks haven’t gone unnoticed by authorities, with a UK-based member of the Lizard Squad reportedly arrested on November 16 after the Labour party attack.

That attack garnered wide-spread media attention after the group allegedly accessed party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s bank account, hitting the party hard in the middle of an election campaign in Britain.

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Facebook and its associated services are operational as of now, so users should be able to use Instagram, Messenger, and other sites without any disruptions. 

Facebook are yet to release a statement on the November 18 attacks, but we will update you when they do.