Were you stalking your ex on social media at around six this morning? (We don't judge.) If so, you may have noticed that Facebook, Tinder and Instagram all went down at about 6.30am. The hacker collective Lizard Squad say they were behind the outage, which occurs just one day after they claimed to hack the Malaysia Airlines website.  

Visitors to Facebook were greeted with a blank page this morning, while those on the app could not refresh their newsfeeds. Instagram (which is owned by Facebook) and Tinder (which relies on Facebook user data) were also inaccessible.

Facebook was quick to deny any hack, saying that the downtime was the result of technical issues. 

"Earlier this evening many people had trouble accessing Facebook and Instagram," a Facebook spokesperson said. "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% for everyone."

Lizard Squad has also promised a "mass email dump" containing sensitive information taken from the Malaysia Airlines system. It temporarily hacked the company's website yesterday, replacing its homepage with a message reading "404 - PLANE NOT FOUND" and its logo, a lizard in a top hat and tux. 

It appears that the group has no particular political objective. Lizard Squad just want to publicly breach and sites that should be harder to crack, humiliating companies and causing havoc in the process.

Lizard Squad took down Sony and Microsoft over Christmas of last year, "ruining Christmas" for people who wanted to play XBox Live. In an interview with Sky News, a member known only as Ryan said that the hacks were designed to expose the low grade of security systems at high profile companies.

The group, which claims to have aronud 15 members, seems to be undeterred from this quest, despite two recent arrests. At the beginning of this year, a 22-year-old man from Twickenham was arrested by police in connection with the Microsoft and Sony hacks. An 18-year-old from Southport was also taken in by police two weeks later. 

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