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Facebook says technical issues with its family of apps resolved

Facebook suffers partial outage in U.S.
Facebook was down for hours on Wednesday, including Instagram and Messenger 01:21

Facebook and Instagram users around the globe had trouble posting content to those social media platforms Wednesday, Facebook confirmed to CNET. The company apparently had issues since 11 a.m. ET, according to Down Detector.

CNET said some of its staff members saw an error message that read "something went wrong" when posting a status update. Facebook told CNET it was having a problem.

"We're aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps," Facebook said in an email statement. "We're working to resolve the issue as soon as possible."

But shortly after midnight EDT the social media giant tweeted word the problem had been fixed:

There was no immediate word on the cause of the outage. Facebook used its Twitter account to say a cyberattack wasn't to blame. It also explained it wasn't due to a "distributed denial of service," or DDoS attack.

A map from Down Detector showed outages across the U.S., Europe, South America, Australia and Asia.

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A heat map from Down Detector shows hotspots where Facebook has been reported to have issues as seen on evening of Wed., March 13, 2019. Down Detector

CNET reported users of Facebook-owned WhatsApp messaging app and the Oculus virtual reality company were also experiencing issues on those platforms.

BBC News reports Facebook had a similar widespread disruption in 2008, when the platform had 150 million users. It now boasts some 2.3 billion monthly users today.

In November, Facebook experienced issues for about 40 minutes after a mishap caused by a test the company was running. That outage lasted about 40 minutes.

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