A temporary outage of social media service Facebook and its photo-sharing site Instagram were due to an internal software networking error and not hackers, the company says.

As of 5:40pm AEDT, Facebook was inaccessible on both the web and mobile application.

The outage at Facebook appeared to spill over and temporarily slow or block traffic to other major Internet sites, according to web and mobile user reports from around the globe.

• Hackers target Malaysia Airlines website

In a tweet that was later deleted, Instagram said it was aware of an outage.

“We’re aware of an outage affecting Instagram and are working on a fix. Thank you for your patience,” the tweet said.

During the outages, Facebook users were greeted with the message: “Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.”

Dating app Tinder and instant messaging application HipChat also appeared to be suffering outages.

Hacker group Lizard Squad, which has been associated with other recent high-profile attacks, posted messages on Twitter suggesting they had been behind the outages.

Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, AIM, Hipchat #offline #LizardSquad

— Lizard Squad (@LizardMafia) January 27, 2015

Lizard Squad recently claimed responsibility for hacking the Malaysia Airlines website, in which it displayed a picture a lizard wearing a top hat over the error message “404 – Plane Not Found”.

In a statement, Facebook said no outside party was responsible for the outage.

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

“Both services are back to 100 per cent for everyone.”

Lizard Squad has taken credit for several recent high-profile attacks, including on the website of Malaysia Airlines and the PlayStation and Xbox gaming networks.