Having trouble accessing Facebook or Instagram on Wednesday? You weren’t alone.
The massively popular social network started having problems at around noon Eastern time, with issues popping up across Facebook proper, Facebook Messenger and Instagram around the world. The service outage is one of the longest Facebook has ever experienced.
Read Tweet about this issue #FacebookDown
Facebook users around the world are reporting issues logging into and posting on the site as well as on Instagram and WhatsApp. Facebook hasn’t given a reason for the outage, and provided minimal information other than acknowledging it is aware services are down in some areas.
Facebook shares were relatively unchanged Wednesday afternoon.
The company acknowledged the outage in a tweet Wednesday, saying, “We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.”
It later confirmed the problem was not the result of a DDoS attack, which refers to a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack in which a hacker overwhelms a site by flooding it with fake traffic.
Some users of Facebook-owned WhatsApp reported having issues sending photos on the popular messaging app.
As with nearly every Facebook outage, users headed to Twitter with the hashtag #facebookdown quickly becoming the top trending topic in the United States.
Downdetector.com, which monitors websites, showed the company experiencing issues across a large portion of the U.S. and Europe in addition to reported problems in parts of South America, Asia and Australia.
It is not immediately clear what caused Wednesday’s issue. Some users reported seeing a message saying the site was down for “required maintenance,” while others were able to get the social networks to briefly load before discovering that functionality was limited.
Users reported a variety of problems, from being unable to load the Facebook site at all to not being able to post comments. Facebook users posted screenshots on Twitter showing error messages when they tried to load the app. When loading the site, some users’ got a message on the screen saying “Account Temporarily Unavailable.” “Facebook Down”
Technical issues with Facebook have historically posed serious problems for advertisers who use the platform and even other websites.
Facebook previously experienced an outage of its tool for advertisers in November at a time when marketers were trying to place ads for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
In 2013, Facebook experienced a glitch which took several websites down with it thanks to the prevalence of its login feature across the internet. When users tried to log into a website with their Facebook profile, they were directed to a Facebook error page, Business Insider reported at the time. The glitch, which only lasted a few minutes, affected websites including The New York Times and CNN, Business Insider reported.
