Nicole Arce, Tech Times

Facebook denies being the victim of an attack allegedly from the troll hacking group Lizard Squad after 45 minutes of outage affecting millions of Facebook and Instagram users in North America, Asia, and Australia.

This has been the longest time Facebook and its photo-sharing site has been down since 2010, when Facebook was down for two hours in what it calls "the worst outage we've had in over four years."

However, while Lizard Squad appears to be claiming responsibility for the most recent outage, Facebook denies its systems have been breached. Instead, the social networking company attributes the service disruption to an update that temporarily mangled its systems.

The loss of service "was not the result of a third-party attack but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems," says a Facebook spokesperson in a statement sent to The Wall Street Journal. "We moved quickly to fix the problem, and both services are back to 100 percent for everyone."

On Twitter, Lizard Squad hinted that it may have been responsible for the outage, naming other mobile services as additional targets. These services were also affected during the time Facebook and Instagram were unavailable.

At around 1 a.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday, users of Facebook and Instagram began having problems logging in to the services. Those who were attempting to log in to Facebook were met with the message: "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on it and we'll get it fixed as soon as we can." Instagram confirmed on Twitter that it was "aware of an outage" and that its engineers are "working on a fix." Instagram's tweet has since been deleted.

AIM, meanwhile, seems to be unaware of what is happening.

Experts suggest Tinder, AIM, and Hipchat, which were all down with Facebook and Instagram, might not have been hacked. Instead, the downtime for these three apps could have been connected to Facebook's login services used for these services.

Lizard Squad is notorious for launching attacks on websites with millions of users just "for the fun of it." The group claims responsibility for a variety of attacks, including last year's Christmas Day on attacks on Sony's PlayStation Network and Microsoft's Xbox Live.

As usual, users who were horrified to find Facebook unavailable took to Twitter either to complain or make light of the situation.

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Tags: Facebook Facebook Downtime Instagram Instagram Downtime Lizard Squad AIM Hipchat Tinder Twitter
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