PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — Facebook appears to be back to normal (or close to it) after experiencing hours-long outages.
Many users of the social media giant were unable to access their accounts on Wednesday. A dialog box stated: “Account temporarily unavailable due to a site issue. We expect this to be resolved shortly. Please try again in a few minutes.”
The outages also appeared to affect other Facebook-owned social media platforms, including Instagram and Messenger. Most of the reports seem to be concentrated on the east coast of the United States and around large cities.
According to Facebook’s status page, the outages started around 11 a.m. EDT on Wednesday. That page, which calls the problem a “partial outage,” states that Facebook has experienced “increased error rates” since that time.
Downdetector.com, a site that monitors site outages, said the Facebook problem affected parts of the U.S., including the East and West Coast; parts of Europe and elsewhere. Both Facebook’s desktop site and app appeared to be affected. Some users saw a message that said Facebook was down for “required maintenance.”
Facebook users were then forced to actually do work instead of looking at their friend’s vacation and baby posts. Many aired their frustration on the only social media platform available to them: Twitter.
Facebook officials also took to Twitter, saying they were “aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps.”
We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.— Facebook (@facebook) March 13, 2019
We’re focused on working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, but can confirm that the issue is not related to a DDoS attack.— Facebook (@facebook) March 13, 2019
Are you getting frustrated without Facebook and Instagram today?— KOIN News (@KOINNews) March 13, 2019
The number of reported problems had dropped back down by around 8:00 p.m., according to DownDetector.com.