'Hello literally everyone' was the post from Twitter's official feed as Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram plunged into what would turn out to be a six-hour long worldwide blackout.

The networking service, which in recent years has shared the attention spans of its millions of users with the other platforms, took the social media spotlight as the Facebook-owned apps went down last night.

As reports of problems with Facebook began to surface, and thousands took to Twitter to query whether it was their own internet or a more global problem, the very first memes began appearing mocking the rapid return of users to the blogging website famed for its 280-character thought-sharing tweets.

Pictures of overflowing trains, long lines of runners sprinting full-pelt across a field, images of cats creeping unnoticed through a back door and the familiar Forest Gump clip of Tom Hanks running down the driveway in the hit Hollywood movie were among the images that accompanied the 'everyone coming back to twitter' jibe.

But it wasn't just Twitter's most-dedicated followers that mocked, as hundreds of thousands more people began descending on the site.

Some of the world's biggest names in music, film and televisio came out to play too, as it became clear that Twitter was currently the only major working social media platform.

Twitter's 'hello literally everyone' welcome tweet, sent at 6.27pm UK-time, as Facebook entered its second hour of no service, received more than three million likes and was retweeted more than 570,000 times around the world.

And among the big names to answer was global hit singer Adele, who with rumours circulating of an impending release of new music has millions stalking any move on her social media feeds, replied with a 'Hiya babes' that was rapidly liked by almost 200,000 avid fans.

While it couldn't get it's own message exchange services working, WhatsApp also joined in the greetings with a reply that including a waving emoji followed by a simple 'hello' as did fellow-stricken app Instagram, which answered with a 'hi and happy Monday' followed by a shocked, scrambled looking emoji face, as behind the scenes embattled staff were hurriedly trying to get the photo-sharing app back online.

The six hour outage of three of the world's biggest social media apps ensured that many of the world's biggest brands also came to Twitter with their own jokes and tongue-in-cheek attempts at self-promotion.

The official Twitter account for Starbucks Coffee suggested in its reply that it was the 'Perfect time for a coffee break', Zoom's Twitter channel checked-in asking 'can everyone see my screen' and the account for Amazon's Alexa chipped in with 'I don't have hands so I'll just say Hi five times ...Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi'.

But it was perhaps McDonald's that got one of the biggest responses to its exchange, which answered Twitter's welcome with a 'hi what can I get you' only for Twitter to reply with a request for '59.6 million nuggets for my friends' that was rapidly followed-up by the fast-food chain with a query as to whether that was a meal 'for here or to go'.

The widespread disruption to Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram has been blamed on a “faulty configuration change” with most issues ironed out around six hours later and the sites back online.

In a statement Facebook said: “Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication.

“This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”

But the repair did not come before numerous companies had poked fun at the situation, with many sharing graphics and memes of faulty wires and broken plugs, while others mocked Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg by posting an image of an office worker buried under mountains of electrical wiring with only his black shoes visible and the quip 'Mark Zuckerberg today'.

Among those to take aim was the official Twitter account for Mini Cheddars, which shared a meme of someone pulling-out and then putting back, a plug into a socket.

To read more about Facebook's problems and for other outages to have affected major websites click here.

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