Facebook and Instagram suffers disruptions lasting about an hour

Social media giants Facebook and Instagram suffered disruptions lasting an hour on Tuesday making the sites inaccessible to users worldwide. The one-hour outage affected Facebook’s 1.35 billion users and Instagram some 300 million users. The glitch reported in Asia, the United States, Australia and the U.K. affected access from PCs and Facebook's mobile app.

A hacker group called Lizard Squad , a group notorious for attention seeking antics online had tweeted about the services going offline, leading to reports that it might have been responsible.

 However Facebook has issued a statement to TechCrunch denying the outage was caused by outsiders and explaining it was an internal glitch which occurred after it introduced a change that affected it’s configuration systems.

Here’s the Facebook statement:

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. The social media giants are back on after the outage.