Social media collapses as Facebook, Tinder, Instagram crash

"Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on it and we'll get it fixed as soon as we can."

Many Facebook users came across the above message when they tried to access their account early on Tuesday morning. With this, the social networking site crashed for the second time in less than a week and third time in three weeks. Its messaging service, however, wasn’t affected.

The outage, which lasted for about 40 minutes, was due to a "configuration issue", Facebook told CNBC. It was first reported at around 5.03 am EST, but was back online for most users around 6 am.

Several users took to Twitter to express their opinion, and soon after #facebookdown was seen trending.

A Facebook spokesperson said, “We’re currently restoring Facebook services that people had trouble accessing earlier today due to a configuration issue. We’re working to bring things back to normal for everyone. We apologize to those who have been inconvenienced.”

Mirror UK reported that in addition to Facebook, Tinder and Instagram also crashed. Tinder, that uses Facebook to authenticate real people, went down shortly after Facebook outage. Instagram was also affected as many users use Facebook login to access their account.