Facebook, the world's most popular social network, and its Instagram photo-sharing site were interrupted temporarily Tuesday, provoking panic, rumours of a hack, and jokes of how more than one billion users were struggling to cope. "This was not the result of a third party attack," Facebook said in a statement after its services were restored.
The outage "occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems," it added. The breakdown, at around 0615 GMT reportedly lasted an hour and hit users in the United States, Europe and Asia, with both sites showing error messages. With users disabled from posting selfies or the latest details of their personal lives, many rushed to Twitter to complain and joke, with "facebookdown" and "Social Meltdown2015" rapidly trending. Some joked about how they had been able to read real books during the enforced social media pause.