Facebook and Instagram were both taken offline this morning around 1AM ET, with a Facebook spokesperson telling The Verge that this was "not the result of a third party attack but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems." Hacking group Lizard Squad had originally hinted that it may have been responsible. Facebook's spokesperson added that the site's engineers "moved quickly to fix the problem, and both services are back to 100% for everyone."

Tinder also reported being downtime this morning, sending a tweet earlier this morning saying: "EVERYBODY PANIC! #Blizzard? North Korea? #TindernetApocalypse." The site said that it had recovered an hour later, reassuring users: "PS: Your matches aren't gone, just logout and log back in!" Work messaging client Hipchat was also affected and claims it is still working on restoring its services. It's possible that the downtime for these two sites was part of a domino effect caused by problems with Facebook's identity services.

Hacking group Lizard Squad, who previously claimed responsibility for the attacks on Xbox Live and the PlayStation network over Christmas, suggested that they might have had a hand in these recent outages. A pinned tweet on the group's Twitter account simply says "Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, AIM, Hipchat #offline #LizardSquad," while an alleged member of the group tweeted a picture of himself holding a sign saying "dox me" with the caption "For all the mad people."

Update January 27th 4:18AM ET: This article was updated to include additional comments from Facebook clarifying that the downtime was not the result of an attack.