The common theme of social media outages is to jump on another network to vent.
As with nearly every Facebook and Instagram outage, users headed to Twitter on Thursday with the hashtag #InstagramDown quickly becoming one of the top trending topic in the United States.
Facebook started having problems at around 5:30 p.m. ET, with issues popping up across Facebook proper, and Facebook-owned sites Messenger and Instagram around the world, according to Downdetector.com.
A message many users saw: “Sorry, something went wrong” and on the app under news and groups, a message said the pages weren’t available and that it “may be because of technical error that we’re trying to get fixed.”
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And the tweets on rival site Twitter started flying immediately. About 20 minutes later, the platforms started working again for many users.
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.”
In January, an unknown number of users were logged out of their accounts, which Facebook said was a configuration change.
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.
Facebook, the world’s largest social media network, has nearly 3 billion monthly users. Among U.S. adults who use Facebook, nearly three-quarters visit the site at least once a day, Pew Research Center reported in 2019.
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Contributing: Terry Collins, Josh Rivera and Jessica Guynn, USA TODAY
Follow USA TODAY reporter Kelly Tyko on Twitter: @KellyTyko
