Facebook and Instagram are back up and running after a suspected hack left users locked out of their accounts this morning.

Hacking group Lizard Squad has claimed responsibility for the outage.

Millions of users worldwide were left without access to their accounts for over 40 minutes at around 6 am this morning.

On logging in they were told: "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on it and we'll get it fixed as soon as we can."

So far the Social Media company has not said what the actual problem was.

Adrian Weckler is Technology Editor with the Irish Independent: