Facebook, Instagram Down? Glitch Causes Outage Problems, Triggers Panic Online

For a brief moment – approximately under an hour – on Tuesday, two major social networking sites Facebook and Instagram suddenly went offline. This quickly triggered panic among their users, with some posting afterward on the microblogging site Twitter about the "social media meltdown."

With no immediate explanation from Facebook about the error message that most users saw on their screens, theories soon started circulating that it was a hacking attack. However, the fact that Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, also went down, led to assumptions that the failure was due to something that originated within the company.

The outage also gave rise to a number of jokes on Twitter, with some users wondering what they would do if Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, AIM and Hipchat would never come online again. Some even blamed the outage on the blizzard that was hitting parts of the United States while others wondered where they would post their selfies since Instagram was down. Some users even described the incident as the arrival of the "Internet apocalypse."

Lizard Squad, which bought down the Sony and Microsoft Xbox gaming networks over Christmas, also tried to take advantage of the shutdown, claiming that they caused it. Members of the hacker group even took to Twitter and posted a photo and tweet that read "Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, AIM, Hipchat #offline #LizardSquad."

After Facebook and its associated services like Instagram and Tinder came online again within an hour, a spokesperson from the company said the outage was due to a "change that affected our configuration systems and not because of any hack attack."

The Facebook spokesman also stated that the company quickly moved to resolve the problem and that "both services are back to 100 percent for everyone."

The Verge said the domino effect on Facebook's associated services could have been triggered when a problem arose with Facebook's system for verifying user's identity.