Hundreds of millions of people were unable to access their Facebook and Instagram accounts for an hour today following an alleged cyber attack.
Millions were unable to access their social media
Online group Lizard Squad claimed to have hacked the two social media sites at around 6am GMT, both of which have a combined total of 1.5 billion users.
Those who tried to log-in received error messages, but now Facebook have claimed that they weren't in fact hacked and instead blamed the outage on a "change that affected our configuration systems".
Claims also flooded other social media that the super-snowstorm that's shut down America's east coast could have been to blame for knocking out its servers, despite Facebook headquarters being located in a part of California unaffected by the storms.
AOL Instant Messenger, Hipchat and dating mobile app Tinder were all also affected.
Whilst it was down, Facebook acknowledged that they were "aware" of trouble accessing the website and were "working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible."
A spokesman went on to add: "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 per cent for everyone."
Posting on Twitter, an Instagram spokesman added: "We're aware of an outage affecting Instagram and are working on a fix. Thank you for your patience."
The Lizard Squad have caused huge havoc online in the past, taking credit for attacks on the Sony PlayStation Network and Microsoft's Xbox Live network just last month in the Christmas period.
This morning saw the group tweet: "Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, AIM, Hipchat £offline £LizardSquad".
One of the group's members had previously spoken out in an interview on BBC Radio 5 Live, following the Christmas Day Xbox and PlayStation attacks.
He explained: "I wouldn't call myself a top-grade hacker - I know people who are way better than me. It's fair to say I know my stuff though", adding that he enjoyed identifying weaknesses in web security's of global companies.
"With me, when people, friends of mine, go out clubbing, partying, I didn't enjoy it so I decided to sit at home and learn more skills of my own.'Maybe this isn't something most people enjoy and think it was a good decision but for us it was something that we just decided upon."
The social media blackout comes after Lizard Squad also claimed to have targeted The Malaysia Airlines website, leaving a message saying "404 Plane Not Found" and declaring it as part of their "cyber caliphate".
Users who tried to log on to the website of Malaysia's national carrier were greeted with the picture of a lizard in a top hat, wearing a tuxedo and monocle whilst smoking a pipe.