Lizard Squad Claims Responsibility For Worldwide Outage Of Facebook & Instagram

Hundreds of millions of people worldwide were unable to use Facebook and Instagram for around an hour earlier today after an alleged cyber attack. The online group, Lizard Squad have claimed they hacked the two sites at around 6am GMT - but Mark Zuckerberg's social media empire says it was just a technical fault. Both sites, which have a total of 1.5billion users, appeared with error messages in the United States, Europe, Asia and even in Nigeria for around an hour.

Facebook, which also owns Instagram, has denied they were hacked and blamed the outage on 'a change that affected configuration systems'.

A spokesman later added: 'Earlier today many people had trouble accessing Facebook and Instagram. This was not the result of a third party attack but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems. We moved quickly to fix the problem, and both services are back to 100 per cent for everyone.'