Server error takes social networks offline

Facebook and some other social networks such as Instagram, Tinder, AOL Instant Messenger, and Hipchat all went offline on Tuesday morning.

However, it has been revealed that suspension, which began around 6:20am GMT and ended 50 minutes later, was an apparent outage at Facebook's headquarters which then trickled down to other networks that use Facebook to authenticate users.

"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,"Facebook told the Guardian.

The outage affected both the websites and apps of the affected services world wide. Facebook-owned Instagram returned a "can't refresh feed" error, while the Facebook website itself simply failed to resolve in the browser.

Tinder, which relies on Facebook for login functionality, was also affected by the social network's failure.

However, WhatsApp which was acquired by Mark Zuckerberg's company in 2014, was not affected by the outage, and remained fully functional.

Notorious hacker group, Lizard Squad, which attacked PlayStation and Xbox Live networks last Christmas, had seemingly claimed responsibility for the outage via cryptic tweets.