Facebook and Instagram were briefly inaccessible across most of the world, with Tinder and HipChat also experiencing disruptions in their services.

Users who attempted to access Facebook were greeted with a page that said "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on it and we'll get it fixed as soon as we can." For some users, the page did not even load at all.

Access to the social networks has since been restored, but the sudden shutdown elicited massive reactions from the online world.

The Lizard Squad, a notorious group of hackers that have previously taken down the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live online gaming platforms, took credit for the downtime through their Twitter account.

""If only we didn't use twitter to communicate..." said the Lizard Squad in a prior tweet sent out less than an hour before, foreshadowing the attack on the social networks and explaining why Twitter was unaffected by the group's actions.

However, Facebook countered the Lizard Squad's claims, stating that the problem was caused by the social network's own engineers.

A spokeswoman for Facebook said to BBC that the access troubles experienced by users of Facebook and Instagram were not the result of a hacking attack. Rather, the problems occurred after the company's engineers introduced a change that had an effect on the configuration systems of the social networks.

"We moved quickly to fix the problem, and both services are back to 100% for everyone," the spokeswoman added.

The websites were not accessible for less than an hour before service was restored. During that time, Twitter was flooded with tweets of users commenting on the service disruption of Facebook.

Facebook's outage propelled the hashtag #facebookdown to first place in Twitter's list of trending topics, showing just how much of the activities of netizens revolve around the social network.

"I hope you all took advantage of the 35 second Facebook outage to Like a person in real life. #Faceboogeddon," said Arthur Goldstuck, a media analyst that used a hashtag that was play on the #Snowmageddon2015 hashtag that has also been trending, referring to the blizzard in New England and New York.

The Lizard Squad was recently connected to a hacking attack that took down the website of Malaysia Airlines, replacing the company's home page with a picture of the tuxedo-wearing lizard that the group uses as their profile picture in Twitter. The hacked page also featured the headline "404 - Plane Not Found," in reference to the airlines' flight MH370 that suddenly disappeared last year.