Facebook and Instagram down worldwide after hack

Facebook and Instagram were down worldwide for around an hour today after an alleged cyber hack.

The online group Lizard Squad have claimed responsibility for the hack, which took down the two social media sites at around 6am GMT.

Both sites, which have a total of 1.5billion users, appeared with error messages in the United States, Europe and Asia for around an hour.

Despite hackers claiming they took the social media giants offline, Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, which also owns Instagram, refused to say what the fault was.

There were claims online that the super-snowstorm that is over America’s east coast may have knocked out its servers, however that would appear unlikely as their main offices are based in sunny California.

Instagram, the photo sharing site owned by Facebook, was also offline although neither company has explained the reason for the outage — Instagram, owned by Facebook, was also down for an hour

The social media blackout also affected the dating mobile app Tinder, as well as AOL Instant Messenger and Hipchat.

While it was down Facebook said they were ‘aware’ of trouble accessing the site and added: “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.”

An Instagram spokesman posted on Twitter: “We’re aware of an outage affecting Instagram and are working on a fix. Thank you for your patience.”