Instagram and Facebook Suffers Outage; Hipchat and Tinder Also Affected

If you was going nuts earlier this morning on your favorite social media site, you was not alone. According to the Huffingtonpost

Facebook and Instagram went down early Tuesday morning as a major snowstorm hit the Northeast. Reports on social media indicate that Tindr and Hipchat were also down.

Users worldwide were affected by the outage, The Associated Press reported, many of whom took to Twitter to express their outrage (mock and in some cases genuine) and crack jokes.

There will be a baby boom in 9 months. #facebookdown pic.twitter.com/SKtxoBwdZF

— Bipartisan Report (@Bipartisanism) January 27, 2015

Widespread global reports now of a phenomenon called ‘talking to each other’. Horrible scenes.

#facebookdown

— sam. (@SamAlexWarren) January 27, 2015

After about 40 minutes, Facebook and the rest of the sites were back online.

Guess who’s back #FacebookDown pic.twitter.com/YPJGES1L3z

— Creative Chaos (@csquareonline) January 27, 2015

Lizard Squad, the hacking collective that claimed responsibility for taking down the Malaysian Airlines website on Sunday, suggested on Twitter that it was also responsible for the social media outage.

However, in a statement cited by TechCrunch, Facebook denied being hacked:

“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.”

Meanwhile, on Twitter, the Facebook outage led to the usual snark, including #pray4facebook and #ThingsIDidWhenFacebookWasDown hashtags.

I played with my real cat instead of watching cat videos. #ThingsIDidWhenFacebookWasDown

— The Geekpreacher (@geekpreacher) January 27, 2015

So, “books”. If that IS your name. We meet again #facebookdown #pray4facebook

— Amanda Bates (@amandabate5) January 27, 2015

#ThingsIDidWhenFacebookWasDown actually walked up to someone and poked them. However they did not wanna be my friend afterwards