Hackers to 'take down Facebook'

Protesters wearing Guy Fawkes masks take part in a march of the 'Anonymous' movement on October 20, 2012 in Marseille, southern France.

You've got exactly five days to save all your Facebook pictures onto a disc, copy your event invites into a old-fashioned hard copy diary and decide who your real friends are: Hactivist group Anonymous have set the date for the Facebook apocalypse, and it's next Monday.

"Anonymous have threatened to take down Facebook and release Zynga's games for free download on 5 November if the latter does not backtrack on alleged plans to lay off 1,000 employees and outsource work," reports Liat Clark in Wired.

On October 23rd, while the tech world was distracted by Apple's unveiling of their iPad mini, gaming giant Zynga announced they would be culling 5 per cent of their employees, gave their Austin, Texas branch employees two hours to leave the building and suggested they may soon close their British and Japanese offices too.

Anonymous weren't happy, in a YouTube video announcing the threatened action a spokesman said: "With a billion dollars cash sitting in a bank we do believe that such actions are an insult to the population and the behaviour of corporations like Zynga must change."

What if Anonymous had taken down Facebook? Would you cope?