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, Facebook 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.”
And the tweets started flying immediately.
About 20 minutes later, the platforms started working again for many users.
Facebook didn’t immediately respond to USA TODAY’s request for comment Thursday.
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In January, an unknown number of users were logged out of their accounts, which Facebook said was a configuration error.
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.
This story will be updated.
Contributing: Terry Collins, Josh Rivera and Jessica Guynn, USA TODAY
Follow USA TODAY reporter Kelly Tyko on Twitter: @KellyTyko
