Facebook and Instagram were down for hours for some users on Tuesday, including in the US, a little more than a week after the world's largest social network said a "routine test" caused the site to go offline.
This time, the tech firm said that "a server configuration caused intermittent problems across all apps globally."Â
"We are back to 100% for everyone and we're sorry for any inconvenience," a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement shortly before 4 p.m. PT.
The outage adds to a list of troubles that have plagued the company this year. Last week, The New York Times published a lengthy front-page report that shined a harsh spotlight on how Facebook executives dealt with a number of scandals, including careless data handling by the company and election meddling by Russian trolls.Â
Downdetector.com, which tracks outages, shows that users reported issues with Facebook around 4:41 a.m. PT. The outage mainly hit the East Coast of the US, along with parts of South America, Europe and Asia. Ahead of Black Friday, businesses were also reporting that they couldn't place ads on the social network because of the outage.
Users flocked to Twitter on Tuesday to vent about the outage using the hashtags FacebookDown and InstagramDown. Even Facebook took to Twitter to alert users the company was working on fixing the outage.
We know some people are having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.
— Facebook (@facebook) November 20, 2018
But for hours, users were still reporting that Facebook was either slow or wasn't working.
Sitting at work waiting for Facebook & Instagram to come back like… #FacebookDown #InstagramDown pic.twitter.com/pWofhKXOOs
— Sesame Street (@sesamestreet) November 20, 2018
When everyone says they don’t use Facebook anymore but the whole world collapses because it goes down #FacebookDown pic.twitter.com/6QvTY6QCJS
— Ossining NY Police (@OssiningPolice) November 20, 2018
Facebook AND Instagram is down! There are millions of people who are now walking around wondering what else their smart phone can do. 😂😂🤣🤣#facebookdown #instagramdown
— KenIsJustKen (@kenisjustken) November 20, 2018
me rushing to twitter to make sure i'm not the only one whose facebook and instagram are acting up#FacebookDown pic.twitter.com/cRsaGCUgqh
— zyx (@kkijiyong) November 20, 2018
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