Panic over: Facebook, Instagram back

Panic reigned when popular social networking websites Facebook and Instagram crashed Tuesday morning due to technical problems. 

Visitors to Facebook and Instagram were greeted with apologies and assurances.

Not Just You: Facebook and Instagram are Down http://t.co/WYeMPhusDA pic.twitter.com/B4MZ3DQrdb

— Gadgets 360 (@Gadgets360) January 27, 2015

Instagram also took to their Twitter account and tweeted an apology to its users saying, "We're aware of an outage affecting Instagram and we are working on a fix. Thank you for your patience."

The tweet however, was removed shortly after the service had been restored.

Reasons for the technical difficulties are still unclear.

The outage that lasted for less than an hour had people tweeting their frustrations away on Twitter.

Here are a few:

With #facebookdown ! Users wer roaming the streets shoving photos in people’s faces and screaming"DO YOU LIKE THIS? DO YOU?

— Anaglogs Daughter (@AnaglogsDaughtr) January 27, 2015

I was going to wish you a happy birthday but Facebook was down. #facebookdown pic.twitter.com/oR7nSewK49

— Bipartisan Report (@Bipartisanism) January 27, 2015

.@facebook has returned. My preciousssss....#facebookdown pic.twitter.com/gTWDb0eVk6

— Wajahat Ali (@WajahatAli) January 27, 2015

As facebook was restored, a hacker group 'Lizard Squad' claimed responsibility for the brief disruption to the world's biggest social network and it's photo-sharing app, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Full access to Facebook and Instagram have been fully restored after users suffered disruptions on Tuesday, Facebook said in a statement.The problem was caused by "a change that affected our configuration systems," the statement said, adding that hacking was not involved.