Facebook and Instagram are back after an outage

You're not the only one who was experiencing issues with your Facebook or Instagram accounts on Thursday afternoon. The sites appeared to be having problems across the US, with reports of outages spiking on Downdetector. 

User reports flagged issues with Facebook's News Feed, while others said they were experiencing a total blackout or login issues. Users of Facebook-owned Instagram also said they were having problems with News Feed and Stories. 

People also cited connection issues on Facebook's Messenger and WhatsApp. Some had trouble sending and receiving messages and logging in.

"Earlier today, a configuration change caused Facebook services to be unavailable to some people. We quickly investigated and resolved the issue," a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. "We apologize for any inconvenience."

As usual, people quickly went to the go-to site for when Facebook and its family of apps is down: Twitter.

People seized the opportunity to poke fun at the apps, with one user tweeting: "The world stepping away from their screens after Facebook and Instagram going down."

Another tweet reads: "Realising Facebook and Instagram are down and I haven't been hacked," along with a dancing GIF. 

"So did we all just log onto Twitter too to see what was going on with #Facebook and #Instagram?" someone else wrote. 

Unfortunately, going to Twitter may not have even been an option for some users, with reports for Twitter also spiking on Downdetector on Thursday afternoon. "Some people may have had trouble accessing twitter.com for several minutes earlier today," a company representative said.