Facebook said a networking issue was to blame for a temporary outage to its social media network, as well as Instagram and WhatsApp, which are owned by Facebook Inc.
Social media users began to report outages and disruptions to their service Monday afternoon.
According to Down Detector, a website that monitors website malfunctions and outages, Facebook began experiencing problems just before 5 p.m. EST.
Down Detector’s live outage map showed that a high proportion of the outages appeared to occur on the east coast of the United States and Canada.
WATCH: Facebook stock plunges, Zuckerberg’s net worth down nearly US$19 billion
The hashtag #FacebookDown was trending on Twitter on Monday with many people taking to Twitter to report that they were unable to access Facebook, and tweeting screen shots of error messages.
Facebook said on Monday evening that it nearly finished resolving the issue.
“Earlier today, a networking issue caused some people to have trouble accessing or posting to various Facebook services,” Facebook spokesperson Jay Nancarrow said in a statement. “We quickly investigated and started restoring access, and we have nearly fixed the issue for everyone. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.”