Facebook, Instagram face brief outage across the world, trends on Twitter

Social media platforms Facebook and Instagram were down in many parts of the world for more than an hour on Thursday. During this 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.

Is your #instagramdown? We know some people are having issues right now. We’re working on it and hope to have everything running smoothly as soon as possible.

— Instagram (@instagram) April 8, 2021

The services on these social media platforms were restored after a brief outage. Facebook returned with a ‘sorry something went wrong’ error message.

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.

And we’re back! Earlier today, a configuration change caused Facebook services to be unavailable to some people. Since then, we have quickly investigated and resolved the issue.

— Meta (@Meta) April 8, 2021

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.