Facebook, Instagram suffer brief outage

Popular social networking site Facebook went down for over 40 minutes Tuesday, the longest in the website's history, though the site was later up and running.

Not only Facebook, popular photo-sharing website Instagram went down as well as a result of technical difficulties, but started working again later.

Facebook said on its website that it was working to resolve the issues which forced many to use Twitter to share opinions, selfies and more, according to a report in The Telegraph.

When attempting to access Facebook, users were told: "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on it and we'll get it fixed as soon as we can."

Hacking group Lizard Squad claimed responsibility for the outages, but Facebook said it was not the victim of hacking.

"This was not the result of a third party attack, but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems," a Facebook spokesman said.

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

This was the longest period the company's website was down since September 2010.

The outage in 2010 lasted more than two hours and Facebook described it on their website as "the worst outage we've had in over four years".

Facebook had 1.25 billion monthly active users at the end of September last year and 864 million daily active users on average.

Based on the average activity data from 2013, the outage could have meant 98 million posts were not made.

Some companies used the outage to promote their own products, including Red Bull in India.