[Update: they’re back] Facebook and Instagram are down right now

Update: it appears that after an hour’s outage, all three services are back online.

A Facebook spokesperson said, “Earlier this evening 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% for everyone.”

Original story follows:

Users worldwide are experiencing issues connecting to Facebook, Instagram and Tinder, on the Web and via mobile apps.

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It’s not clear what’s causing the outage, which first occurred around 1:10am ET. However, Facebook-owned mobile messaging service WhatsApp is running as usual.

It appears that hacker group Lizard Squad is claiming responsibility for the outage which might have been caused by a DDoS attack. Lizard Squad attacked Malaysia Airlines’ site only yesterday and took down online gaming services Xbox Live and PlayStation Network last Christmas.

https://twitter.com/LizardMafia/status/559963134006292481

The last instance of Facebook going down was back in September for roughly 15 minutes, when the social network went down twice that month.

We’ve contacted Facebook for more details and will update this post as soon as we hear back.

While they’re down, it seems sensible to read our complete guide to backing up your computer.