Logging onto Facebook on Thursday meant looking at an empty screen.
Facebook’s News Feed wouldn’t load for many users, while others reported full outages. The app appeared to be working as usual during the issue.
DownDetector (which is owned by Mashable’s parent company) showed a spike in reported problems at the top of the 2 p.m. ET hour.
Problem alert!
Image: downdetector / screengrab / sasha lekach ./ Mashable
DownDetector also showed a barrage of reported issues for Facebook-owned Instagram and Whatsapp around the same time.
As the outages continued, the Twitter posts ramped up — especially from European users where many of the issues were reported. Many tweets stated the obvious:
We reached out to Facebook to find out why we can’t doomscroll as usual.
UPDATE: Sept. 17, 2020, 3:05 p.m. ET After about an hour, it appears the outages and News Feed issues have been resolved.
We’re still waiting to hear back from Facebook about what caused the loading problems and how widespread it was.
UPDATE: Sept. 17, 2020, 3:25 p.m. ET Facebook explained what caused Thursday’s outage across all its services.
A spokesperson wrote in an email, “Earlier today some people may have had trouble accessing our family of apps due to a network configuration change. This issue has since been resolved, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”