Social media platforms Facebook and Instagram were down in many parts of the world for more than an hour on Thursday. Because of the outage users were not able to send or receive messages. Users headed to Twitter on Thursday with the hashtag #InstagramDown quickly becoming one of the top trending topics in the United States.
The services on these social media platforms were restored after a brief outage. Facebook returned with a 'sorry something went wrong' error message.
There have been similar issues in the past that have seen all of these services suffer outages at the same time. Notably, the outage is the second one in less than a month from the social media giant. A similar outage was reported on March 19 in which the sites were down for several hours.
Facebook issued a statement saying a configuration change caused the services to be unavailable to some people. The social media giant has investigated and resolved the issue.
A Facebook spokesperson later said in an emailed statement, "Earlier today, a configuration change caused Facebook services to be unavailable to some people. We quickly investigated and resolved the issue. We apologize for any inconvenience."
Facebook, the world's largest social media network, has nearly three billion monthly users.
In January 2021, an unknown number of users were logged out of their accounts, which Facebook said was a configuration change.
A similar outage was reported on March 19, 2021, in which the sites were down for several hours.
In March 2019, Facebook had one of the longest outages in the company’s history and was out for many users for more than 12 hours.