Facebook, Messenger and Instagram apps displayed on an iPhone. Facebook says it is aware of outages ... [+]
Facebook and Instagram users on Wednesday were met with messages that the social media sites were down. Some users aren’t able to log into their accounts at all while others are experiencing limited functionality.
Facebook, which owns Instagram, has not released a press statement on what’s caused the outage or when sites will be restored. The following maintenance message is posted as users attempt to login:
Facebook is down for required maintenance right now, but you should be able to get back on within a few minutes. In the meantime, read more about why you're seeing this message. Thanks for your patience as we improve the site.
The “read more”link leads to a help page that states:
“This usually means we’re making an improvement to the database your account is stored on. While this process won’t affect your account, you temporarily won’t be able to access the site.Keep in mind, we don’t do site maintenance on all accounts at the same time. It’s possible that your friends will be able to access the site while your account is still unavailable.”
Facebook.com
Reports that both Facebook and Instagram were down started trickling in around 11 a.m. EST. A U.S. outage map on Downdector, a site status website, indicated that both social networks were not functioning for users in large portions of the East Coast, California and Texas.
downdetector.com
As the social media platform scrambles to fix the problem, it reassured users via Twitter that it was resolving the issue promptly:
A change to the platform’s configuration caused outages on Facebook and Instagram in 2015 that lasted for 50 minutes.
In 2010 the platform experienced a 2.5-hour outage related to overwhelmed databases caches, and as a result, Facebook had to “stop all traffic to [a] database cluster, which meant turning off the site.” Facebook redesigned its platforms configuration system to avoid future problems.
Then, as now, social networkers turned to #facebookdown on Twitter to humorously voice their frustrations:
Forbes will update this post should Facebook’s company blog and developer post a statement about the outages.
See more coverage about the outage here.
