Facebook and Instagram down worldwide for an hour after 'hack'

Yesterday the Lizard Squad claimed they had brought down the Malaysia Airlines website

• Hackers from the online group Lizard Squad have claimed responsibility
• Facebook and Instagram were down at 6am GMT for around an hour  
• Mark Zuckerberg's companies have refused to say what caused the outage 
• AIM, Tinder and MySpace were also claimed to have been offline    
• Lizard Squad hit Malaysia Airlines, Sony and Xbox in past month

Facebook and Instagram were down worldwide for around an hour today after an alleged cyber attack.

The online group Lizard Squad have claimed responsibility for the hack, which took the two social media sites down at around 6am GMT.

Both sites, which have a total of 1.5billion users, appeared with error messages in the United States, Europe and Asia for around an hour.

But despite hackers claiming they took the social media giants offline, Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook, which also owns Instagram, refused to say what the fault was.

There were claims online that the super-snowstorm that is over America's east coast may have knocked out its servers.

Hacked? Facebook and its stable-mate Instagram were down for an hour this morning after an alleged cyber attack

Statement: Instagram, the photo sharing site owned by Facebook, was also offline although neither company has explained the reason for the outage

The social media blackout also affected the dating mobile app Tinder, as well as AOL Instant Messenger and Hipchat. 

While it was down Facebook said they were 'aware' of trouble accessing the site and added: 'We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.'

An Instagram spokesman posted on Twitter: 'We're aware of an outage affecting Instagram and are working on a fix. Thank you for your patience.' 

There is no word at this time what is causing the outage, and whether or not it might have anything to do with the ongoing blizzard, which is expected to dump 36 inches of snow in parts of New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey and Connecticut, where key servers are based.

The headquarters of Facebook are located in Menlo Park, California - an area which has not been affected by the storm.

The hashtag #facebookdown and #socialmeltdown2015 immediately started tending on Twitter, which remains operational.  

Facebook had 1.25 billion monthly active users at the end of September last year, while photo-sharing service Instagram has 300 million active monthly users uploading around 70 million photos per day.

The Lizard Squad is a group of hackers that has caused havoc in the online world before, taking credit for attacks that took down the Sony PlayStation Network and Microsoft's Xbox Live network last month.

This morning the group tweeted 'Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, AIM, Hipchat £offline £LizardSquad'.

Previous: Yesterday the Lizard Squad claimed they had brought down the Malaysia Airlines website

The outage sparked panic online, but the majority retained a sense of humour 

Another user Gino Quillamor wrote: 'Now that facebook is down, I might actually have to ask people how they're feeling in real life. "What's on your mind?"'

Rob Lee joked: 'If Facebook & Instagram are down how am I supposed to know what my aunt had for dinner or if any of my friends held a Starbucks cup today???'

On a more serious note, less than 30 minutes into the shutdown, a hacker group known as the Lizard Squad claimed responsibility for the outage.

In August, it also tweeted to American Airlines that there might be explosives on a plane carrying the president of Sony Online Entertainment, which makes video games, forcing the flight to be diverted.

Yesterday, it claimed to have targeted The Malaysia Airlines website, leaving a message saying '404 Plane Not Found' and declaring it part of their 'cyber caliphate'

Users logging on to the site of Malaysia's national carrier earlier today were greeted with the picture of a lizard in a top hat, monocle and tuxedo, smoking a pipe.

The image was surrounded by the message '404 Plane Not Found', an apparent reference to the airlines' unexplained loss of flight MH370 last year with 239 people aboard.

The extent of any links with the Islamic State, however, are not yet known.

The jihadist group has seized large swathes of Syria and Iraq in a brutal campaign and declared an independent Islamic 'caliphate'.

It also has used social media to recruit and spread its message.