The online group Lizard Squad have claimed responsibility for the hack, which took the two social media sites down at around 6am GMT.
Both sites, which have a total of 1.5billion users, appeared with error messages in the United States, Europe and Asia for around an hour.
But despite hackers claiming they took the social media giants offline, Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, which also owns Instagram, refused to say what the fault was.
There were claims online that the super-snowstorm that is over America’s east coast may have knocked out its servers
The social media blackout also affected the dating mobile app Tinder, as well as AOL Instant Messenger and Hipchat.
While it was down Facebook said they were ‘aware’ of trouble accessing the site and added: ‘We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.’
There is no word at this time what is causing the outage, and whether or not it might have anything to do with the ongoing blizzard, which is expected to dump 36 inches of snow in parts of New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey and Connecticut, where key servers are based
The hashtag #facebookdown and #socialmeltdown2015 immediately started tending on Twitter, which remains operational.
Facebook had 1.25 billion monthly active users at the end of September last year, while photo-sharing service Instagram has 300 million active monthly users uploading around 70 million photos per day.
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