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Facebook blames outage on 'server configuration'

The social network, along with its apps such as Instagram, were down for hours Tuesday.

Queenie Wong Former Senior Writer
Queenie Wong was a senior writer for CNET News, focusing on social media companies including Facebook's parent company Meta, Twitter and TikTok. Before joining CNET, she worked for The Mercury News in San Jose and the Statesman Journal in Salem, Oregon. A native of Southern California, she took her first journalism class in middle school.
Expertise I've been writing about social media since 2015 but have previously covered politics, crime and education. I also have a degree in studio art. Credentials
  • 2022 Eddie award for consumer analysis
Queenie Wong
2 min read
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

James Martin/CNET

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." 

"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. 

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.

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Screenshot from Downdetector.com

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.

But for hours, users were still reporting that Facebook was either slow or wasn't working.

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