Facebook: No 3rd party attack on network or Instagram

Laura Mandaro | USA TODAY Network

Show Caption Hide Caption Facebook and Instagram go down, people tell Twitter all about it There was a worldwide crisis when humans tried to log into Facebook and Instagram, and their accounts were unavailable! No one had to suffer in silence though, because Mark Zuckerberg still doesn't own Twitter.

SAN MATEO, Calif. — Facebook said it suffered a self-inflicted outage lasting an hour Monday that made its site inaccessible to users worldwide.

The glitch reported in Asia, the United States, Australia and the U.K. affected access from PCs and Facebook's mobile app. The social media giant's Instagram service was also inaccessible.

In a statement to USA TODAY on Tuesday, Facebook said: "Earlier today 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."

However Lizard Squad, a group notorious for attention seeking antics online, claimed responsibility on Twitter for the outages.

Attempts to access Facebook and Instagram, which Facebook owns, over multiple sites had returned "this webpage is not available" and on Safari, "the server where this page is located isn't responding."

The dating app Tinder, which relies on Facebook to provide its service, was also affected.

"We're aware that many people are currently having trouble accessing Facebook and Instagram," said spokesman Jay Nancarrow in an emailed statement before the popular networks returned.

Users' Facebook newsfeeds still seemed to be showing older updates than usual soon after service resumed, however.

The outage, overlapping with a Northeast blizzard dubbed "snowpocalypse", was long enough for the Internet comedians. Some one-liners were grouped under the hashtag #socialmediameltdown2015. This mostly happened on Twitter and Google-plus, naturally.

The temporary loss of service may be Facebook's biggest outage since Sept. 24, 2010 when it was down for about 2.5 hours. Facebook has about 1.35 billion active users and Instagram has some 300 million.

Contributing: Jane Onyanga-Omara in London, Associated Press